To ensure the safety of people on the internet, especially of children, the Indian government has asked social media and internet giants like Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, Instagram among others to get rid of the links to the 'Blue Whale' suicide game. FINANCIAL EXPRESS August 16 2017

As Indian IT services companies gear up to embrace new technologies like automation, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud to meet client demands, the need for reskilling and upskilling is growing. Over the years, the IT industry has faced the challenge of finding right talent as the technology landscape is undergoing rapid changes.Betting big on this opportunity, a group of online learning and education start-ups are providing digital courses to individual employees and corporates to help them get skilled and become future-ready employees. These companies provide both offline and online curricula that enable working professionals pursue various courses....THE HINDU June 18 2017

Ameerpet, a squeezed neighbourhood of Hyderabad has become India’s unofficial cramming-college capital. By 7.30am the place is already buzzing as 500-odd training institutes cater to over 100,000 students looking to improve their IT skills....THE ECONOMIST March 30 2017

Much of the painstakingly detailed animation for the live-action/ CGI Disney film The Jungle Book was done in the Bengaluru offices of the Soho-headquartered Moving Picture Company. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects this year. A lot of the advanced computer graphics technology used to shoot the tiger scenes in Life of Pi was done in the Mumbai and Hyderabad offices of Los Angeles-based SFX company Rhythm & Hues. Life of Pi won the Best Visual Effects Oscar in 2013......Why is there such a dearth of good quality content at home when there’s so much Oscar-winning talent? THE HINDU March 26 2017

The Philips Innovation Campus in Bangalore, is using technologies such as machine and deep learning, artificial intelligence technologies to help in the early detection of diseases.... LiveMint, Feb. 16 2017

Silicon Valley exports technology and imports the world’s best talent. That is how it has helped grow the nation’s economy and boosted its competitive advantage. President Trump’s executive order banning immigrants from some Muslim countries sent shock waves through the tech industry over the weekend because it was a loud and clear message to the world that the United States’ doors are now closed..... Vivek Wadhwa in The Washington Post January 30 2017

India may have leapfrogged the U.S. technology industry with simple and practical innovations and massive grunt work. It has built a digital infrastructure that will soon process billions more transactions than bitcoin ever has. With this, India will skip two generations of financial technologies and build something as monumental as China’s Great Wall and America’s interstate highways......Vivek Wadhwa in the Washington Post January 23 2017

Bharat Ratna and Nobel laureate, Professor Amartya Sen, who is currently Thomas W Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University spoke to The Indian Express on demonetisation and said, that both, the idea and the way it was implemented, was akin to a “despotic action” and betrayed the “authoritarian nature of the government”. INDIAN EXPRESS Nov. 26 21016

Technology, promoted as a social equalizer, is having the opposite effect in one of the world’s largest markets......Air conditioners, washing machines, cable television. Balbir, a retired cook, has embraced them all. But there is one innovation that isn’t welcome in his home: the smartphone.Mr. Balbir, who goes by one name, can afford one. They sell for less than $50 in India these days. But he fears the freedom that comes with them could lead his daughters astray. Wall St. Journal October 13 2016

Results of the recenty-conclude spectrum auction show that telecom firms like Vodafone, Idea, Airtel, and now Reliance Jio, continue to spend vast resources in buying spectrum. ...India’s wireless services industry has acquired quite a reputation for unrestrained bidding in spectrum auctions. Even though spectrum in the 700 (megahertz) MHz band was ridiculously priced, there were fears that someone might take the government’s bait. The fact that 700MHz spectrum was left untouched has understandably led to a sigh of relief.....Live MINT October 10 2016

The jolt from the Brexit verdict to global financial markets has been near catastrophic, with stocks and currencies bleeding and bonds going into a tailspin. But believe it or not, if you can afford to survive this knee-jerk response of the market with a little bit of patience, still better if you can use these hours of fear and anxiety to position yourself, better things are in store. ECONOMIC TIMES June 25 2016

Twitter hashtag #SaalEkShuruaatAnek marked the first anniversary of the Modi government, and #TransformingIndia is marking its second.In the journey between these two hashtags, some efforts have been made to ‘transform’ governance through Twitter by Ministers such as Sushma Swaraj, Nirmala Sitharaman and Suresh Prabhu. This is even as many other Ministers use it to announce new programmes and highlight the achievements of the government... Hindu Businessline May 26 2016

Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon should be happy that even before it turns three in India on June 5, the company has emerged a leader in this market....Flipkart and Snapdeal take a cue from Amazon even as they differ on who is ahead in the race. Mint May 27 2016

A year after shutting down its website in favour of an app-based model, the e-retailer has taken a U-turn, highlighting the flaws of the smartphone ecosystem...When fashion discovery portal Myntra shut down its website in favour of its mobile app in May last year, it essentially went in blind. Fast forward to a year later and Myntra is bringing back its website, and just as the Flipkart-owned company did last year, it's kicked off a raging debate about the viability of app-only business models. Business Standard May 10 2016

The Facebook page of a young District Collector who captured the imagination of an entire State with an innovative idea to help the hungry, has drawn over 2 lakh respondents and followers in just under a year. Kozhikode District Collector, N. Prasanth, who assumed office in February 2015, uses the page to bounce out-of-the box ideas off the public..... The architect of the Kozhikode food coupons programme now has 2 lakh followers. THE HINDU, May 9 2016

India has rejected Apple Inc.’s request to import and sell refurbished iPhones to the world’s second largest mobile population, an (Indian) telecommunications ministry official said ... Apple’s rivals have mounted a public campaign against the effort, arguing that such a move would trigger a flood of used electronics while defeating the government’s Make-in-India programme to encourage local manufacturing. Bloomberg May 3 2016

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. That, of course, is a simplistic understanding of the working of divinity, but seems to fit the bill when it comes to telecom in India. On the one hand, a real revolution is sweeping through the universe of consumer handsets, with prices for features that were once the preserve of expensive flagship units dropping by as much as 80%, offering consumers amazing computing power in the palm of their hand, with which to perform wonders. On the other, perverse policy is driving up the cost of telecom services, aborting those wonders that are waiting to happen in education, healthcare, new businesses and other life-transforming transactions....EDITORIAL in the ECONOMIC TIMES March 17 2016

The obituaries all cited Raymond Tomlinson, who died over the weekend, as the "inventor" of email, but out in the cold in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Shiva Ayyadurai bristled..... Chidananda Rajghatta is alone among Indian correspondents in remembering the Indian inventor of email on a day when Tomlinson who only contributed the @ symbol, is hailed as he dies...... Times of India, March 8 2016

For years, Mark Zuckerberg has had a grander vision than just connecting the more than one billion people who already useFacebook: He wants to connect the entire world.That effort hit a major roadblock on Monday, when Indian regulators banned free mobile data programs that favor some Internet services over others....New York Times February 9 2016

It is surprising and unfortunate that the Karnataka government is still refusing to face the reality that the state, and its showpiece, Bengaluru, do not offer the right environment for starting and running a business. The government is not ready even to accept its responsibility for creating the right conditions for business and industry to thrive..... DECCAN HERALD Leader January 23 2016

While Facebook has been getting more than its fair share of criticism from the online media for its Free Basics program, the company has been trying its level best, spending more money to promote and gain acceptance from users. On the other hand we have those who are a part of the industry dissing the whole program and today there’s some more news on that front. First Post December 31 2015

India may be the next great frontier for American technology companies.Facebook has embarked on an ambitious — and controversial — effort to expand access to the Internet among India’s population. Google, Microsoft and others are also eying expansion on the subcontinent. And the world’s largest democracy is also courting Silicon Valley.... New York Times December 28 2015

Obama administration officials say the Islamic State has used a range of encryption technologies over the past year and a half, many of which defy cracking by the National Security Agency. Other encryption technologies, the officials hint, are less secure than terrorist and criminal groups may believe, and clearly they want to keep those adversaries guessing which ones the N.S.A. has pierced...... New York Times November 16 2015

Prof Mayank Shrivastava of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has become the first Indian to win the prestigious IEEE Electron Devices Society Early Career Award. He is assistant professor at the Department of Electronics Systems Engineering and working on developing nanoelectronics and nanotechnological solutions for ‘System on Chip’ applications. New Indian Express, October 29 2015

...companies are setting up production plants only to assemble and not actually produce phones. Meaning, cellphone makers are importing all of the 25-30 components that go inside and outside the handset including your screen, chipset, camera, battery and even charger from outside India (read mostly China)..... New Indian Express October 25 2015

ICICI Bank has become the first institution worldwide to launch mVisa - a card-less and device-less solution the payments company is betting on in the mobile space. ICICI Bank has incorporated the mVisa application in its Pockets app, which allows payments to be made by scanning a static QR code and entering the amount.ECONOMIC TIMES October 2 2015

The Modi government will have its work cut out on skill development; just over one in 10 adults reported having received any vocational training, according to new official data, and the bulk of it was informal. The Hindu September 24 2015

The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), a mission to have supercomputers at IITs, the Centres for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DACs) and the Indian Institutes of Scientific Education and Research (IISER’s) has decided to place supercomputers in 73 locations across the country including several in Bengaluru. Deccan Herald September 25 2015

Michael Dell, founder of the privately owned American computer technology firm that carries his name, indicated that initiatives such as Make in India and those in the Digital India space had the potential to write a new chapter in the firm’s India investment diary. “The Smart Cities project is a tremendous opportunity for us,” Dell observed at an interaction with the media. The Dell chief also signalled he was watching the Indian start-up ecosystem closely.....Financial Express September 8 2015

Taiwanese electronics maker Foxconn will invest about $5bn over the next 5 years to build a manufacturing facility in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, marking one of the largest foreign direct investment deals in Indian corporate history. Financial Times August 8 2015

.....We failed to resolve the issues at our level. So we persuaded Kalam to accompany us to try and push the schedules. How he accomplished that was a lesson in management we would never forget..... Anand Parthasarathy inTHE WEEK August 9 2015

Tech firms are investing in artificial intelligence platforms to help clients cut operational costs, avoid human intervention in repetitive tasks... some within TCS bill ( their recent work) as one of the most significant technological innovations to come out of the $15 billion company: An artificial intelligence (AI) technology platform. Live MINT, June 8 2015

Jana, a Boston-based start-up, says it has figured out a way to offer billions of people in the emerging world free access to the Internet without violating the Web’s open nature. A few days back, it launched Jana Loyalty, a product that seeks to reward its smart phone users in two ways. One, it reimburses users the cost of downloading and using an app of Jana’s clients. Two, it gives free additional data with which the user can access any content online. THE HINDU May 8 2015

Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka has poached yet another SAP executive Jason Wolf and put him in charge of "experience design", marking at least the 14th top-level hire from the German business software maker since he joined in August last year. Economic Times April 30 2015

India plans to elbow its way into the top club of nations that flaunt superior supercomputing prowess. The newly sanctioned Rs 4,500-crore supercomputing mission is also expected to give a leg up to scientific research in the country."It will completely change the way we do research. The mission will definitely bring non linear transformation for Indian science," said prof N Balakrishnan, head of Supercomputer Education & Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science....Economic Times April 6 2015

Some of its biggest products — Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign — are now entirely developed and managed out of India. And Adobe is strengthening its capacity in the country by buying office buildings in Bengaluru and Noida....quoting CEO Shantanu Narayen. Times of India, March 27 2015

While the short-term impact of the just-concluded telecom auctions will be negative for all telcos given the additional debt burden for purchasing spectrum —most of the( money) paid has been for re-purchasing spectrum the telcos already owned—the important thing to keep in mind is that there has been a fundamental change in India’s telecom compact over the years. Editorial in Financial Express March 27 2015

Telecommunications provide India a unique opportunity to leapfrog technologies and empower people with information... India’s telecom infrastructure is critical to its prosperity. But for this to happen government needs to get its policies right, which means telecom companies must have access to plentiful and affordable spectrum.... Editorial in Times of India, March 9 2015

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley during his Budget 2015 speech acknowledged the concerns of the $150 billion Indian IT industry. Even though he did not announce any big bang measures for the industry, experts said that the fine print of the budget has a few positive measures for the industry. Business Standard, March 2 2015

Cisco, the global networking products giant, has been closely engaged with the creation of smart cities in the country. Today, with the government’s Digital India programme to create 100 smart cities, the company is further enthused about its plans for the market with all signs pointing in the right direction, says Padmasree Warrior, chief technology & strategy officer, Cisco, in an interview with PP Thimmaya..... Financial Express, March 2 2015

Padma Bhushan Faqir Chand Kohli, father of the Indian software sector, turned 90 on February 28, 2014. Millions who join the Indian information technology (IT) sector every year should celebrate this day, because had it not been for him, the sector would not have reached where it is today. Kohli is best known as the first chief executive of India's largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services.....BUSINESS STANDARD FEBRUARY 4 2015

Dell is looking towards India to transform its research and development capabilities that have lagged rivals for years.The US technology company is strengthening its engineering team here and increasing the number of patent applications filed from India - which, a senior executive said, has already become the largest contributor to software patents for Dell...ECONOMIC TIMES, FEBRUARY 6 2015

Picnickers visiting Chennai’s Vandalur zoological park during the year-end were peeved those carrying smartphones were each charged an extra `25 over and above the entry ticket. The zoo management argued that since a fee of `25 was traditionally collected for taking in a still camera, those carrying smartphone, too, should cough up the same amount as the mobiles have an in-built camera....NEW INDIAN EXPRESS January 3 2015

...the Centre only recently decided to cut back on healthcare by 20 per cent. Public spending on health in India is already one of the lowest in the world; now the budget faces trimming by about Rs 6,000 crore to keep expenditure down to about Rs 30,000 crore this fiscal.... Editorial in Deccan Chronicle, January 2 2015

Aruna Sundararajan, former Kerala IT Secretary, who left her footprints on the State’s e-governance and e-literacy, is now part of the Digital India vision.She heads Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL), which is tasked with building the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) that aims to take high-speed broadband connectivity to 2.5 lakh gram panchayats.... HinduBusinessline January 1 2015

It’s just not actors who have to be comfortable in front of the camera these days.Employers across industries — such as hotels, travel agencies, marketing firms and modelling agencies among others — have begun seeking ‘selfie resumes’, pushing many job-seekers to shoot videos to market their talents. Hindu Businessline December 23 2014

The mothballed Sriperumbudur plant of Nokia, once the world's single largest mobile phone-making unit, may be sold in parts. The Finnish company has appointed Hilco, a global leader in handling distressed investment and assets, to take over the machinery and hard utilities. Economic Times December 16 2014

The Modi government should take a stand on the draconian provisions of the Information Technology Act. The slew of petitions before the Supreme Court is a measure of the concern Section 66 and its sub-sections have caused among all IT users. They are so sweeping in nature that anybody who sends or forwards an email, which may be “offensive”, can be given three years’ imprisonment. Editorial in New Indian Express December 12 2014

Many of the world's most exciting new companies - Twitter, Dropbox, Tesla — are being driven by Indians in top management roles. Contrary to popular perception, they are no longer limited to just technology, which Indians are traditionally known for. Economic Times November 18 2014

The 800-plus remaining employees at Nokia’s Sriperumbdur plant now have no choice but to opt for a voluntary retirement scheme as operations are to be suspended from November 1. Hindu Businessline November 1 2014

Connovate Technologies, the maker of multifunctional piece Gecko, has been acquired by Hong Kong-based consumer electronics company Binatone for an undisclosed amount, heralding a breakthrough for Indian startups in the internet-of-things (IoT) space. Economic Times October 13 2014

With the last of the founding team of Indian IT bellwether Infosys Ltd, Kris Gopalakrishnan, set to retire from the company on October 10, a formal farewell was given by Infosys to all its founders here on Wednesday. ‘I was fortunate that my passion for computing became my profession, and that I was able to make an impact in this industry through Infosys, through the innovations we pioneered and the jobs we created,” the Infosys co-founder Gopalakrishnan said at the farewell.... INDIAN EXPRESS October 11 2014

We have a long-standing practice at Amazon that instead of focusing on other companies we try and stay focused on our customers.... CEO Jeff Bezos in Bangalore this week... THE HINDU, September 29 2014

Apple iPhone 6 ran its sales on 19th September and saw a huge crowd storming the stores. With fans and customers queuing up overnight and camping outside the store days earlier, the result shows that Apple has a huge fan following.However, this does not seem to the actual case.....Francis D'Sa, Deccan Chronicle.com, September 22 2014

Thousands of rare and original palm-leaf and paper manuscripts at the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library here will soon be available to the public at the click of a mouse.The 72,300 manuscripts, providing a deep insight into subjects as varied as the Vedas, the Agama Sastra, architecture and mathematics, are being digitised as part of a Tamil Nadu government initiative to preserve the intellectual heritage of the State. THE HINDU September 11 2014

Pune, known as a BPO hub for information technology majors, is now a hot destination for back offices of global banks, which are set to witness a hiring boom in the next 18-24 months. ECONOMIC TIMES September 12 2014

A report launched by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) titled ‘India’s Surveillance State’at the Internet Governance Forum, currently underway in Istanbul, said the Indian state is violating the privacy of its citizens through use of internet monitoring systems.An application filed under the Right to Information Act by SFLC revealed a list of 26 companies that had expressed interest in a tender floated by the Director General for Police, Logistics and Provisioning for Internet monitoring systems, underlining the large number of firms active in selling surveillance equipment in India... Vidya Venkat in THE HINDU, September 5 2014

A report, India's Surveillance State, released in connection with the Internet Governance Forum at Istanbul recently, avers that the Indian government issues orders to intercept around 7,000-9,000 phones every month.This reveals that Indian citizens continue to be subject to surveillance by their government on an astonishing scale... ECONOMIC TIMES editorial September 5 2014 ( see next story in this section for details of the report from The Hindu)

The Times Group has entered into a partnership with leading US-based news and opinion website Huffington Post, to launch the website's Indian edition. The website is expected to be launched later this year.The combined strength of Huffington Post, which has 86 million monthly global unique visitors (desktops, comScore June 2014) and the Times Group, which has deep local knowledge and extensive reach, would compete with Indian news brands such as Firstpost and Scroll. Times of India Aug 22 2014

Four Indians are among Fortune magazine’s list of 20 “extraordinary” technology czars and young entrepreneurs analysing and processing big numbers to discover information that will “transform the way businesses operate.” Fortune’s maiden ‘Big Data All-Stars’ lists the 20 extraordinary people who are “the best at connecting the dots and digging deep.” PTI report in Asian Age August 6 2014

Microsoft is looking at establishing a data centre in India that would allow it to offer its cloud solutions more seamlessly to Indian businesses, and especially to the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector. Times of India August 5 2014

If you are weary of bad pantry food - the rubbery parathas and watery dal - you can now order interesting fare online, and have it delivered piping hot at railway stations. Times of India's Priya Menon checks out some online catering options ( July 21 2014)

Srinivasan Ramani calls himself the "internet plumber" of the 1970s. As the former head of National Centre for Software Technology (now, C-DAC Mumbai), he and his colleagues nurtured the internet in India and watched it transform the country. Recently, Ramani, 75, became the first Indian to be inducted into the Internet Society's prestigious Hall of Fame..... Times of India July 20 2014

The fast-growing online retail industry is set to take a larger chunk of the overall e-commerce market growing from the current 16% to 28% in the next two years, finds a study by advisory firm eTailing India. Growth of mobile shoppers is one of the main reasons behind this expected growth. Mobile shoppers will more than double to reach 220 million by 2016. Economic Times July 14 2014

Consider this: at $360 billion (Rs 21,60,000 crore), India is the sixth largest grocery market in the world. Within this, modern retail (led by the top eight cities) accounts for around 20 per cent. If one slices the pie further, you will find that a new kid on the block - online grocery retail - is slowly wedging itself in, and is expected to reach around 2 per cent of the expanding grocery market by 2020, creating a potential market size of around $10 billion (Rs 60,000 crore). Business Standard July 14 2014

"We are very pleased with the talent in India. Going from 1,700 people to 11,000 people, seven-fold in seven years -that's a big number. We are approaching half of our engineering talent here....." John Chambers, Cisco CEO, in an interview with Sujit John,The Times of India, July 1 2014

Ten years ago, the Indian-born Sundar Pichai, 42, was a product manager at Google, and his domain consisted of the search bar in the upper right corner of Web browsers..... In 2013, CEO Larry Page put him in charge of Android, making him one of the most powerful technology executives in the world. BusinssWeek June 24 2014

Google has announced it was working on a low-cost smartphone aimed at emerging markets as part of an initiative called Android One."We are going to be launching it around the world, but will launch in India first in the fall of this year," Sr, VP Sundar Pichai said at the Google Developers Conference last week. Times of India, June 27 2014.

A project at Gujarat Forensic Sciences University (GFSU)'s Institute of Research and Development may have found the answerto spurious drug detection. The now complete project has employed nanotechnology to come up with cheaper, faster and more reliable detectors which can tell the difference between a standard drug and the sample provided. Times of India, June 21 2014

Google's mea culpa last week about so many of its staff being white and male, left some demographics unstated -- till The Times of India's Chidanand Rajghatta unearthed them....He writes: .... Here's something the internal diversity report threw up that didn't get all that much attention: Google is also 30 per cent Asian in the US, a significant uptick of an ethnic group whose overall population in the country is only 4.8 per cent.

Chidanand then goes on to point at the predominant part that Indians play in Google's higher echelons....TIMES OF INDIA May 31 204

Kumud Srinivasan , president of Intel India Pvt. Ltd and general manager of Intel Architecture group in the country, has been with the company for nearly 27 years. She underscore's the India contribution to Intel's global R&D.... Live MINT, May 31 2014

U.S. social networking company Twitter is planning to replicate parts of its India election strategy across countries that go to polls this year, after it emerged as a key tool for politicians and media companies during the world's largest democratic exercise..... Now, with polling due in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and the United States later this year, the San Francisco-based company plans to take its India lessons abroad to expand its foothold in the political arena and increase its user base REUTERS (India) May 24 2014

While there's been a lot of attention on online retail and customers shopping increasingly through mobile phones, the unassuming retailers of the other screen--television--have been performing strongly with a targetted approach.ECONOMIC TIMES May 16 2014

“Consumer expectation for rich graphics is rising amid a massive proliferation of mobile devices and displays,” says Nvidia’s managing director for South Asia, Vishal Dhupar. In a recent interaction, he shares with Sudhir Chowdhary key insights on how his company is addressing this opportunity, both worldwide and here in India.... Financial Express April 21 2014

"We develop economically relevant products for this economically challenging application—healthcare in India. I find this everywhere", says GE Healthcare President John Dineen, in an interview published in Financial Express, April 14 2014

The startup community has just found a new patron in none other than institutional investment firm Xander Group.Virtuous Retail, a mall developer-cum-operator backed by Xander with a committed equity of $600 million, is creating an incubation centre for entrepreneurs at its upcoming mall in Whitefield, Bangalore, a first among mall developers in the country.Times of India, April 15 2014

The exodus in IT major Infosys is not limited to top level management but also with the other staff as the company reported an attrition rate of 18.7% in the fourth quarter of FY14 against 16.3% in the same period last year. Attrition levels were 18.1% in the third quarter of FY14. Recent exits, which include former head of Americas Ashok Vemuri and former CFO V Balakrishnan, had raised concerns among investors....New Indian Express April 16 3014

Ramesh Gopinath, a Bangalorebased software engineer, has written code for artificial intelligence that he believes is ahead of its time. Gopinath, 40, wants to make sure the code is used even after his lifetime and has willed it to his son, who wants to follow in his dad's footsteps. Gopinath opted for a digital will, detailing his assets, including the code.... ECONOMIC TIMES, March 29 2014

Bharti Airtel recently got relief from the Delhi Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) in a dispute. In itself, this would not be remarkable, but for the strong language used by the ITAT to castigate the assessing officer: frivolous, unreasonable, wholly indefensible and worthy of further scrutiny... ECONOMIC TIMES editorial, March 14 2014

In an exclusive interview with TOI — the first with an Indian newspaper or TV channel since his ascension to the post of CEO in February — Satya Nadella insisted that software is "one of the most valuable, malleable resources" of the organization and that his primary objective as Microsoft chief would be to deliver software-driven advanced innovations that would help enrich customer experience. Times of India, March 10 2014

India is poised to lead the world in connecting the poor to bank accounts through mobile phones. This is an ambitious goal. According to the World Bank, only 35% of Indians use formal financial services right now. But India can get to 100%, and if it does hundreds of millions of Indians will be able to create better opportunities for themselves and their families.... BILL GATES in Live MINT, March 10 2014

An ability to think big and act has pitchforked InMobi, onto a global arena where it competes with Google, Facebook and Apple for top honours in the market for data-driven mobile advertising.ECONOMIC TIMES, March 7 2014

It faces problems aplenty, but the Rs 20,000-crore National Optical FibreNetwork can bridge the gap between rural and urban India if implemented well....checking out the pilot projects in three Indian states. Hindu Businessline, March 5 2014

One of the world's largest digital marketplaces eBay Inc is leading a $134 million (Rs 830 crore) investment inSnapdeal in a deal that suggests investor appetite for the potential winners in Indian e-commerce remains intact.ECONOMIC TIMES February 28 2014

Neeraj Arora, 35, is vice-president at WhatsApp, the company that Facebook acquired for $19 billion. But " Business Guy" is what he calls himself on his LinkedIn profile. He was the first business person in WhatsApp, joining the company in 2011 to help the founders, who were primarily engineers, set up the business... TIMES OF INDIA, February 22 2014.

Internet giants Facebook and Google have recently acquired two India-based technology start-up companies. This is expected to give a boost to entrepreneurship in India, home to tens of thousands of software engineers and a thriving information. VOICE of AMERICA January 31 2014

Father of Indian Animation and Founder of Graphiti, Ram Mohan, who has kept inspiring the Animation Industry for decades, has been selected for the prestigious Padma Shri Award, India’s 4th highest Civilian award this week. ANIMATION XPRESS Januar7 27 2014

A TV set top box (STB) made in India is dearer by about the cost of a small Domino's margherita pizza compared to an imported box from China. In a market that is fast shifting from cable TV to direct-tohome satellite TV, the number of STBs needed is huge - about 75 million of the boxes that help decode satellite signals and display content on TV screens would be needed over the next few years.That's a large enough market to manufacture them locally ....Shelley Singh in the ECONOMIC TIMES January 19 2014

In his last quarter as the co-CEO of $22-billion SAP, the world's largest business management software maker, Jim Hagemann Snabe, outlines the achievements of his four-year tenure .. and shares his view on the achievements of SAP in India... ECONOMIC TIMES January 23 2014

Just when local IT services companies are already on the edge with rising protectionism and tightening visa norms in their biggest market, the US, India’s second-largest player is bogged down by governance challenges. ECONOMIC TIMES Feb 14 12017

Shahid Ahmad of Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) has devised a Jacquard card punching machine that eliminates two weeks of manually punching a card with the binary sequence to an hour's work. for the weavers of Chanderi village in Madhya Pradesh... BANGALORE MIRROR, January 22 2014

Bangalore-based InMobi has fast emerged as one of the largest mobile advertising networks in the world. As early starters, InMobi is giving internet advertising giant Google a run for its money with its revenue expected to touch a billion dollar by the end of this year.... FINANCIAL EXPRESS January 20 2014

Dr Na D’Souza, president of the 80th All India Kannada Sahitya Sammelan, slammed the software and biotech sectors for not contributing to Kannada language and culture.“The growth of the IT and BT industries here looks like a threat to Kannada", he added. New Indian Express, January 7 2014

Bangalore is the supercomputer capital of India. The new list released in December 2013 by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) revealed that Bangalore has seven supercomputers, pipping Pune that has six. Deccan Herald January 13 2014

Some American technology entrepreneurs are seeking to pursue untapped opportunities in India, even without the clout of a multinational corporation backing them... BUSINESS STANDARD/ New York Times January 2 2014

Wipro is ramping down production at its PC manufacturing and assembly factories in Uttarakhandand Puducherry. The company is also shifting some of the employees in manufacturing division to other roles, said people familiar with the matterECONOMIC TIMES December 5 2013

A social media analytics firm, co-founded by two Indian-American entrepreneurs, has been acquired by Apple for over $200 million. A San Francisco-based start-up, Topsy Labs, was co-founded by Vipul Ved Prakash and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. The Hindu, December 3 2013

The domestic information technology (IT) sector will grow by 12-14 per cent, while IT exports are likely to reach $86 billion in the current fiscal on the back of adoption of new technologies and tapping new geographies by corporates, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) said. The Hindu November 21 2013

India is fast becoming a test bed for technology companies to perfect software solutions that they sell to healthcare providers in the United States, where a new health law has spurred demand for such services.Economic Times November 22 2013

PayPal’s Chennai development centre will soon be home to more than just its staff as it plays host to one-of-a-kind start-up incubator to promote a culture of entrepreneurship and help boost the growing technology start-up ecosystem in the country.Under a partnership with The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Chennai, PayPal is all set to provide office space, mentoring, technical training, and networking opportunities to start-ups. The Hindu November 12 2013

Government agencies and departments, regarded as bywords for inefficiency and red tape, have recorded over a billion e-governance transactions so far this year, watershed for the world's largest democracy that is betting on technology to cure its ills. Economic Times October 29 2013

The services-led growth, by generating high-wage non-manual jobs for the educated, has been of immense benefit to the middle classes. The end of this pattern of growth naturally appears as a dreadful prospect to them... Ajit Ghose in Sunday Business Standard October 27 2013

In their haste to propagate the populist measure of distributing laptops to school students, State governments are overlooking the basic issues that can make this scheme a success. The Hindu October 15 2013

With over 20 million users, India is now the second largest market for professional networking site LinkedIn.The company says sign-ups for the professional social network have risen by more than 500 per cent since it opened an office in the country in November 2009.... says Nishant K. Rao, Country Head, LinkedIn India.Â BusinessLine October 3 2013

Chinese software outsourcing firms are unlikely to catch up with Indian and other global software services firms anytime in the near future, despite a major policy push towards outsourcing from Chinaâ€™s central government in recent years, according to a new study by a top US-based business school.In a study, titled Providers in China and USA: Preliminary Comparison, Arie Y. Lewin a professor at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, says Chinese firms are struggling to make an impact in the global IT services market at a time when the industry is fast reaching saturation point amid severe competition among global and Indian firms. Live MINT October 2 2013

Calling the US shutdown unfortunate, Som Mittal, President ofNASSCOM told ET Now that since Indian firms do not do much work for the Federal government; the failure of US to meet thefundingdeadline will not impact IT.The shutdown may cause a delay in visa processing which will in turn have an impact on the mobility of employees to US for work, Mittal said. "However, this impact will be marginal....Times of India, October 1 2013

Indian exports to America face the demurrage threat due to US shutdown, in the world's largest economy, engineering exporters' body EEPC India said today. "Commercial ports do not come under emergency service category, so there will be a delay in port services like clearing of goods from ports due to staff shortage. This may result in huge demurrage for exporters. PTI report in Indian Express October 1 2013

Indian e-commerce, pegged at $9.5 billion (Rs 47,349 crore) last year (including online travel bookings) according to a study by the Internet & Mobile Association of India and KPMG, would be a force that would take on physical retail head on, possibly forcing the closure of many brick-and-mortar stores. Business Standard September 17 2013

Nine out of ten mobile internet users in India are men and 60.% tech-savvy youngsters (Under- -24) constituting a large chunk of these users, according to a study conducted by Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Telecom Tiger, September 6 2013

The key thing missing in India is that there aren't enough successful role models. In the US, once a Harvard dropout does a very successful venture, there are thousands of others who will want to follow that path, parents will be less resistant to it. Once you have a Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg here, things will change. It will happen in the next five-six years, and that will take care of even other issues like regulation and funding.TIMES OF INDIA September 6 2013

It is amazing, in this racially enlightened century, that we still see members of theUS Congress demonizing an ethnic group. Yet that is what happened when the Senate adopted a provision in the immigration bill singling out Indian and Indian-American information-technology companies that have operations in the U.S. with punitive restrictions on H-1B work visas. By contrast, the legislation expanded access to the visa to others in the technology industry.Bloomberg view, Aug. 27 2013

Research in printing technology is making it possible to custom-build bones, tissues, teeth and pre-operative models of complex body parts.... Dr Narinder Mehra, head of the department of Transplant Immunology & Immunogenetics at AIIMS, New Delhi, says the technology has a long way to go in India but the potential is vast. DNA, August 18 2013

Mixed signals emanating from the Supreme Court have done little to strengthen efforts to protect free speech online. Last week, the court rightly hauled up the Uttar Pradesh government over its arrest of scholar and writer Kanwal Bharti for his Facebook post criticising the suspension of IAS officer Durga Shakti Nagpal. The same day, however, the SC refused to stay the implementation of the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, which require websites to take down objectionable material posted by third-party users within 36 hours of being notified of the need to do so. Editorial in The Hindu, August 19 2013

What 7 Facebook engineers did in India... Did they crack 3 big questions? Facebook has started to analyze the market of India, a 7-person engineers team has visited Agra, Mathura, Hyderabad to know the trends in India.Economic Times July 30 2013

GoogleIndia managing directorRajan Anandansays the next phase of growth for the Internet in India will be driven by local-language content. He also spoke to us recently about the company’s role in India, and how he sees technologies like driverless cars or augmented reality (Google Glass) gaining widespread adoption over time. Live Mint August 5 2013

Winners of mBillionth Award South Asia 2013, which seeks to promote innovations in mobile technologies for better governance, rural development and inclusive growth, were announced last week. The award honours innovations in mobile applications and service delivery. As many as 33 winners were announced in various categories which include business and commerce and banking, education and learning, entertainment, health and governance. Live MINT July 22 2013

With the growing adoption of smartphones in India, Google India released a study conducted by IPSOS titled 'Multi-Screen traveller'. The study was conducted to understand the behavior of smartphone users in India and its impact on the travel vertical, focusing on a target group which uses multiple devices to get online for their travel related needs. The study revealed that 76% users use both computer and mobile across the travel stages (dreaming, researching, booking, experience, sharing) while 60% users move from one device to another when they switch from researching to booking. DataQuest Channels July 18 2013

Flipkart's successful raising of $200 million (about Rs 1,200 crore) in its fifth round of funding could well mark the launch of version 3.0 for India's still fledgling but rapidly maturing e-commerce activity. Business Standard July 16 2013

Dabur India and Hindustan Unilever (HUL) have both highlighted why the rural markets are so critical and what they are doing to better their rural sales.HUL’s decade-old Project Shakti received a technology boost in 2012.....Dabur’s rural sales force used mobile phones to report sales Businessline July 14 2013

Top tech company execs are quite famous for their fat pay checks. But think again, it’s not the big pay checks but the free perks which can really stun you. The kind of ”luxuries” offered by companies include hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of time on the corporate jet to odd things like "personal" use of a company administrative assistant.... SILICON India June 6 2013

Kukucrate.com, an online platform run by Bangalore-based Kukucrate and offering theme-based and hands-on learning projects for kids in the age group of 4-8 years, claims its customer count has crossed the triple digit mark since its launch in January this year. TechCircle.in, May 6 2013

A recent study by Kauffman Foundation says 33% of the co-founders of engineering and technology startups in the US since 2006 are Indians, leaving other immigrant communities far behind. The past 18 months have seen a slew of startups — with at least one Indian co-founder — being acquired by the biggies. Others have tapped the US capital markets with successful listings.Times of India, May 22 2013

The television advertisement that hit the airwaves in Florida last month featured the Republican Party’s rising star, Senator Marco Rubio, boasting about his get-tough plan for border security.
But most who watched the commercial, may be surprised to learn who bankrolled it: senior executives from Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn...The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives.NEW YORK TIMES May 4 2013

Slightly more than a decade after India officially embarked on a concerted Rs.1,000 crore effort to accelerate nanoscience and build an industrial base reliant on nanotechnology applications, it has doubled its share of research publications in the sector in that period. On the other hand, it has barely made a dent in being able to translate this research into usable products, says a just published report on nanotechnology in India. Live MINT, April 23 2013

New Delhi: The government of India, home to many of the world’s leading software outsourcing companies, wants to replicate that success by creating a homegrown industry for computer hardware. But unlike software, which requires little infrastructure, building electronics is a far more demanding business.... NEW YORK TIMES April 15 2013

Local smartphone makers in India with aggressively low prices are outselling worldwide market leaders Apple and Samsung, according to new data. The sales are being driven by first-time smartphone buyers in India, according to a report published Friday by Bloomberg. The big winners have been Karbonn Mobiles India Pvt. and Micromax Informatics Ltd., which have priced their handsets below 4,000 rupees, or about $73 U.S. APPLE INSIDER April 12 2013

Infosys' fourth-quarter numbers are far below expectations. The stock tanked more than 21%, dragging benchmark indices down with it. It added a mere $28 million in revenue for the quarter, almost all from Lodestone, the Swiss consultancy firm it bought in 2012 for $350 million.... Economic Times, April 12 2013

D Shivakumar , Nokia's operations head for India, West Asia andAfrica, has decided to quit the Finnish mobile phone maker after an eventful eight years. During his tenure,Nokiafirst dominated the handset market in the country, but then saw itsmarket sharefall precipitously as it got squeezed between lowcost competitors on the one end and high-end smartphone manufacturers on the other.Economic Times March 29 2013

Indian telecom minister, Kabil Sibal, responded at an event organized by Google, that India remains committed to free expression on the web.
“We are wedded to the freedom of expression,” Mr. Sibal said. “We shall do nothing to diminish that freedom.”Wall St Journal March 22 2013

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt asked the Indian government to change its laws governing the Internet and to create a favorable ecosystem for entrepreneurs and startups in the country. “There are a set of things to be fixed by the Indian government,” Mr. Schmidt said at an event in New Delhi. Wall St Journal March 20 2013

Hotmail creator Sabeer Bhatia and the Yogesh Patel led Jaxtr Inc has launched a global sim card 'Jaxtr SIM' for international travellers. The pre-paid sim card works on phones ranging from Android, iPhone, Windows and BlackBerry devices. Times of India March 21, 2013

India plans to launch its first navigational satellite in June, a top official of the Department of Space (DoS) (has) said
The first Satellite of Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) constellation, IRNSS-1 will be launched by PSLV-C22, said DoS Secretary and Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) K Radhakrishnan. According to ISRO officials, IRNSS is an independent regional navigation satellite system, designed to provide position accuracy of better than 10 metres over India and the region extending about 1500 km around the country Indian Express March 16 2013

In signs of growing Internet snooping by the enforcement authorities, India made an average of 13 requests a day to Google for access to personal web details of web users during 2012. In terms of the number of requests for web user details during 2012, India is next to only the US, which made 45 requests a day on an average the highest for any country. The Times of India March 11 2013

In the world of technology, it is possible to have centers of innovation outside of Silicon Valley. Shocking, right? We’re not talking about just Boulder, Austin, Los Angeles, or even New York City. Think more globally like Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Toronto, and Sao Paulo. Another country that is emerging on the world stage as a place investors, entrepreneurs, and technologists should pay attention to is India.In a country of approximately 1.2 billion people, there are at least two notable places where startups seem to be emerging: Delhi and Bangalore. It is the latter city that made it onto the Startup Genome’s Global Startup Index in 2012. TheNextWeb.com March 4 2013

How exactly this (telecom) revolution, positive and negative, has come about is the subject of a new book, The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics and Daily Life. The title is a bit of a mouthful but it does tell us, upfront, the trigger for India's mobile madness—cost. Dilip Bobb in Financial Express March 3 3013

The watch with a 2-inch screen comes with a 2-megapixel camera and runs on an older version of the Android operating system. The four young guns behind this are three 24-year-olds - software developer Ankit Pradhan, communications professional Pavneet Singh Puri and lawyer Apurva Sukant, and the barely-out-of-school Siddhant Vats who at 17, is their youngest member. TIMES of INDIA February 25 2013

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site, sees potential in the 80 million professional Indian workforce, which it hopes to tap to grow from its present 18 million membership in India at present, with more professionals and companies turning to social media for job searches. DNA February 20 2013

Azim Premji has become the first Indian to sign up for the Giving Pledge, an undertaking by large-hearted billionaires to dedicate a majority of their wealth to philanthropy. The Wipro founder and chairman, who has already committed nearly 9,000 crore to the cause of education, will direct more of his charitable giving towards the endowment supporting his philanthropic foundation. ECONOMICTIMES February 20 2013

Samsung Electronics is to market a phone designed in India for sale in China and other leading emerging nations in a sign of the growing interplay between the two countries with the most mobile users.FINANCIAL TIMES ( LONDON) February 15 2013

Relegated to the back shelves of bookstores, Hindi and vernacular books are now finding a new friend in online portals. E-commerce has done for them what brick and mortar stores failed to do—provide access, publicity and discounts that have helped push sales phenomenally. The availability of e-books and the presence of numerous online selling portals, such as Flipkart, Dial-a-Book and Indiaplaza.com, among others, have become another medium through which Hindi and regional publishers can reach readers. Financial Express, February 10 2013

Thirty Indian software product companies have come together to form a new association, marking the first break from the omnibus IT industry body Nasscom and reflecting the growing confidence and maturity of the software product community. The founding members, led by Bharat Goenka, co-founder of Tally Solutions, Sharad Sharma, former head of Yahoo India R&D, startup mentor and founder of Brand Sigma, Naveen Tewari, founder of InMobi, and Vishnu Dusad, founder of Nucleus Software, will have their first meeting in Bangalore on Monday ( Feb 4) to formalize the association and develop action plans.TIMES OF INDIA February 3 2013

BlackBerry, whose smart phones have for long been used by the professional class, is adding a dash of spice to attract younger users. Its latest phones, will feature applications developed by 57 companies housed within Kochi's Startup Village, an incubation centre backed by the Kerala government

For Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, one of the first free e-mail services in the world, Chennai is special. He was in the city again late last month to open a 250-seat facility for his company, AMP Technologies, a cloud-based real-estate asset management platform.

CA Media, the Asian investment arm of The Chernin Group, has acquired an undisclosed large minority stake in Graphic India, a comic book and animation company focused on creating mythological and superhero characters, comics and stories for the Indian youth market, published across mobile and online platforms.

The government on Monday allowed the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to increase course fees by 80% in a move aimed at giving the premier engineering schools greater financial autonomy. The fees for undergraduates, who form the majority of the student population in the engineering colleges, will rise to Rs.90,000 a year from Rs.50,000 from the next academic session. The annual fee was last revised to Rs.50,000 from Rs.25,000 in the 2008-09 academic year. MINT January 8 2013

…The Tomar episode, when social media set the agenda and put the government on the back foot, is one more example of rise of people's power online. The political class in India has been shaken by the speed and efficiency with which the recent protests were coordinated… Economic Times, December 29 2012.

Rajasthan seems an improbable setting for a technology revolution. Yet for the past year the historic northern state has provided the testing ground for an idea that some believe could help bring basic financial services to hundreds of millions of Indians for the first time â€“ in the form of mobile moneyâ€¦. Financial Times ( London) Dec 27 2012

MindHelix Technosol, a company at the incubator Startup Village( in Kochi, Kerala, has been selected by US-based Alchemist Accelerator Programme for its enterprise product start-ups.The company which had created the TukTuk meter, a GPS-based auto fare calculator, has been selected for its cloud computing-based customer interaction application. DECCAN CHRONICLE December 31 2012

India has doubled its supercomputing capabilities over the past year by adding at least 12 new machines that have put cities such as Bhopal, Indore and Ludhiana on the country’s supercomputing map. The combined capability of the country’s top systems has crossed 1 petaflops (1,000 trillion calculations a second) for the first time, according to ‘Top Supercomputers-India’, the latest list compiled by the Indian Institute of Science. INDIAN EXPRESS DECEMBER 31 2012.

For years, Karnataka's land records were a quagmire of disputed, forged documents maintained by thousands of tyrannical bureaucrats who demanded bribes to do their jobs. In 2002, hopes emerged that this was about to change. The southern state, home to India's technology hub in Bangalore, unveiled Bhoomi, a program that digitized Karnataka's 20 million handwritten land records.
But a decade later, Karnataka remains plagued by land disputes that merely migrated from paper to the database, and even the programme's creator says it could take 30 more years to sort it all out. Times of India December 25 2012 ( Associated Press report)

From the "first look" of forthcoming Hindi films such as Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag to music videos of rapper Honey Singh, reality shows and breaking stories, India is increasingly going online for news and entertainment.

Video consumption on the Internet has increased 40-50% over 2011, said Praseed Prasad, head of digital trading at GroupM, a media-buying agency. Live MINT December 24 2012

Technology is bringing about a fundamental change in the way healthcare is delivered. For evidence, look at Max Super Specialty Hospital in south Delhi where a significant portion of patient records are now electronic with minimal usage of paper charts. Financial ExpressDecember 3 2012

Total R&D spend in India doubled since 2007 and is now estimated at $40 billion, says a recent study by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. Besides, the number of patents filed in the US and Europe by Indian companies has also registered a significant jump. Until very recently, innovation was almost exclusively the preserve of advanced economies. That's no longer the case.ECONOMIC TIMESDecember 5 2012

At $100 billion-plus, India's IT-BPO industry is large. However, largely focussed on the low-end services delivery, it neither has the heft nor the glamour that Silicon Valley in the US enjoys. That may be changing slowly. A just-released report by IT consultancy firm Zinnov reveals that IT product start-ups in India have been growing steadily over the years. Since 1990, it is estimated that more than 3,400 product start-ups were seeded in India.ECONOMIC TIMES November 18 2012

India's largest online retailer Flipkart.com is setting up the country's largest e-commerce warehouse in Whitefield. It will be spread over 200,000 sq ft. . Sources involved in the project told Bangalore Mirror that Flipkart ships around 45,000 items a day, but expects the new warehouse to handle up to 100,000 items a day. BANGALORE MIRROR November 16 2012

A second wave of foreigners are setting up India-focused firms,drawn by the countrys growing market.Entering areas like training,gaming and technology,they are also attracted by the opportunities,writes Radhika P Nair in the ECONOMIC TIMES, November 16 2012

India ranks second globally in accessing private details of its citizens, next only to the US, if the latest data from Google is to be believed.In the first six months of 2012, India made 2,319 requests involving 3,467 users. In comparison, the US made 7,969 requests in the same period and Brazil, which comes third, sent 1,566 requests.Times of India November 15, 2012

A lot is riding on Aakash-II. There's redemption: a year ago, Aakash-I, delivered by Tuli's company DataWind, was universally panned for being a showpiece and little else, and Aakash-II comes with significant upgrades.ECONOMIC TIMES nOVEMBER 2 2012

Is freedom of expression more restricted on the Internet than in the real world? The 2011 amendments to the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, mean just that. There are two levels of restriction on free speech on the Internet, one decided by the Constitution, and the other by the IT Act.Live MINT November 3 2012

Nokia on Tuesday launched Lumia 510 in India, the first country where this phone is being introduced. It will be launched in other countries including China and Finland soon. Hindu businessline October 24 2011

Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande, one of the top tech entrepreneurs from India in the Silicon Valley, is shutting his company Sycamore Networks. The Nasdaq-listed company, which develops and markets bandwidth management solutions for fixed line and mobile network operators worldwide, shot into fame during the earlier technology bubble with market capitalisation at one point of time touching as high as $18 billion. BUSINESS STANDARD OCTOBER 28 2012

(Ashok) Soota’s fledgling Happiest Minds, founded last August, is his second entrepreneurial venture and is well on track to achieve $100 million in revenues in the shortest time for an IT services company...DECCAN Chronicle October 22 2012

...A report prepared by Google and research firm IPSOS reveals that hotels were the most searched for destinations in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The Imperial emerged as the most searched for hotel in Delhi; Mumbaikers were busy keying in The Trident, making it the most popular hotel on Google Maps, and The Leela Kempinski was the most searched five star property in Bangalore...INDIAN EXPRESS October 22 2012

The number of active Facebook users in India has swelled to 65 million, according to Kirthiga Reddy, director (online operations) at Facebook India. This is an eight-fold jump in a span of two years.BUSINESS STANDARD October 19 2012

A lot of newsprint is being utilised these days to state that Kerala is now engulfed in an emerging wave of young technology entrepreneurs and how the state government is hand holding college students to earn their millions while still in their mid-20s. This for me is a very simplified analysis of Kerala’s technology landscape and points towards a certain ignorance of how things work in the tourist state.DARLINGTON JOSE HECTOR in Financial Express October 1 2012

(The India )Government portal data.gov.in, which will be used to share official data with the public, is set to be fully functional soon.
Now in beta or testing phase, the site has technically gone “beyond it,” and full-fledged data uploading could begin a couple of weeks after an official workshop scheduled for next month, CEO of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure R. Siva Kumar told The Hindu. With this, India joins the rank of a growing number of nations that plan to use open data as a tool to promote transparency and efficiency in government. THE HINDU, October 1 2012

Telecom firms, which have neglected rural areas so far, may finally have to turn to them for adding new users as growth in the lucrative urban areas slows. Monthly subscriber additions in the bigger cities have halved over the past year. On the other hand, Tier III cities, which make up Circle C, have logged the highest minutes of usage (MoU) among all telecom circles at 401, much above the national average of 346. DNASeptember 26 2012

According to the annual PC sales data by hardware industry body Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT), only 0.28 million units of netbooks were sold in 2011-2012. However, as per industry estimates, about 0.35 million tablets were sold in India during the same period.BUSINESS STANDARD, SEPTEMBER 20 2012

Infosys has overhauled its client engagement strategy by dedicating senior executives to watch over each of its top customers, its latest adjustment in the face of complaints that the company may be losing its mojo. The top 50 clients, who together account for half of Infosys' $7-billion ( Rs 38,000 crore) revenue, will be waited on hand and foot by two executives, with one of them permanently based at the same location as the customer. ECONOMIC TIMES September 21,2012

Indian Information Technology companies are among the world’s 10 lowest-paying employers in the segment, with their mid-to-senior level staff getting an average salary of $38,767 (about Rs 21.5 lakh) per annum — less than one-fourth of the IT pay package at globally top-paying Swiss firms, says a study titled 'World wide IT Salary 2012'. Press Trust of India story in BUSINESS STANDARD September 10 2012

India's telecoms regulator, the Department of Telecom (DoT), will try to put a crimp on mobile cybercrime by keeping a tight leash on visiting foreigners and their SIM cards. The Department has issued a ruling that stops service providers from providing a mobile connection for more than three months to any foreign tourist visiting India. THE REGISTER (UK) SEPTEMBER 3 2012

On Thursday last, most of the 500-odd employees of Happiest Minds Technologies had converged in the courtyard of their newly-set-up office in Electronics City on the outskirts of Bangalore.
Dressed in every possible ethnicwear, including the salwar pajama with the Mysore petta (a head gear of Mysore royals), dhoti-kurti, saree; the senior management, including founder Chairman Ashok Soota, and the employees were cutting cakes. The celebration was doubly important as the company had advanced the usual birthday celebrations which it does at the end of every month for employees whose birthday falls in a month... BUSINESS STANDARD September 3 2012

Making innovative use of technology, Amidray Technologies Private Ltd, a Kochi based Startup company, has launched a Smart Phone application for payasam lovers of Kerala during 'Onam'. 'It is first time in India that a company has launched an application that helps order food through a smart phone having android application," according to Pratheeksha A K, CEO of Amidray Technologies Pvt Ltd. A Press Trust of India story in TIMES OF INDIA August 28 2012,

Pitching in on the current debate on the possible danger of cellphone radiation, the Environment Ministry says a review of available scientific information by its panel of experts shows that “electromagnetic radiations interfere with the biological systems.” Accordingly, it has asked the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) not to allow new mobile towers to be constructed within a one-kilometre radius of the existing towers. THE HINDU, August 11 2012

At a time, when private enterprises are only testing the waters around cloud computing, India's central government has made a bold decision to migrate critical information infrastructure on the cloud. The Department of information technology is planning to set up a national cloud based network that connects all state data centers which would make that the backbone of national e-governance plan, which when completed would deliver many government to citizen and government business services via the internet. In effect, each of the 28 states and 7 union territories will now have a private cloud of their own. ECONOMIC TIMES August 11 2012

Carlos Ghosn wants to take back more than just entry-level cars from India. What he really wants in his bag is a peculiar Indian way of life, a mindset he believes is the code to crack emerging markets. He’s mentioned it more than a few times now and even sent a senior executive to India to imbibe the idea of jugaad—essentially grassroots improvization but now an Indian management concept that’s come to mean an innovative fix for just about anything.MINT August 3 2012

Anand Shimpi is one of the most influential tech industry figures you've never heard of. From his start as a teenager building PCs for students and faculty at a college in his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, he's become one of the semiconductor industry's most closely watched reviewers. His website, AnandTech.com, is all about product performance, plain and simple. Noel Randewich, REUTERS, RALEIGH, North Carolina(US) July 27 2012

The newly appointed member of Rajya Sabha, cricketer Sachin Tendular, has been appointed a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology. Among scores of brands Sachin endorses for commercial gain is Kaspersky, a Russian security software firm. This is could give rise to conflict of interest as the parliamentary panel often deals with issues relating to security software. DINESH SHARMA,MAIL TODAY's Science Editor in his blog, July 25 2012

The software industry in India's technology capital, which has been a beneficiary of benign government neglect, is concerned that the malevolent gaze of arcane rules and regulations may be falling upon it. Employers in Bangalore, home to some of the world's most prominent software companies, are worried that a law made applicable to IT companies starting this year has the potential to cause them severe headaches at a time the young industry is going through its worst phase. TIMES OF INDIA July 23 2012

MUMBAI: India is expected to overtake the US in 2017 in terms of digital TV penetration while China will have the mostpay TV subs at 315 million by end-2017, according to a study by Digital TV Research. India will follow behind China with pay TV subscriberstouching 145 million, the study said. IndiaTelevision.com, July 9 2012

Kapil Sibal has just announced that Aakash 2, an ultra-cheap tablet, will be launched in July. Why is there no applause? Because Aakash has already proved a fiasco once before.. Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar in the ECONOMIC TIMES June 29 2012.

e-Retail buyers have always been a fix on how the product looks when worn. Zovi.com comes up with a solution as it launches the first ever virtual trial room in India, to enables its customers to check out instantly how they look, with select Zovi merchandise. Dubbed as ”Zovi Eye”, it will be featured on the website which will help buyers make a purchase decision as they view themselves in their desired apparel via an interactive web-cam application. Indian Retailer.com

Over 35 per cent of companies operating in various sectors across India are engaged in corporate espionage to gain advantage over their competitors and are even spying on their employees via social networking Web sites, according to a just-concluded survey undertaken by apex industry body Assocham. Hindu Businessline, June 19 2012

India, the world's third largest internet market, is working against a ticking clock to adopt IPv6, the new web addressing system, as the present addressing system has run out of internet addresses. Asia Pacific Network Information Centre ( APNIC), the internet registry for India, has run out of IPv4 addresses with barely a few left for transition to IPv6. The department of information & technology had directed all states and the central government to switch to IPv6 by March 2012. That plan is still running behind schedule. ECONOMIC TIMES June 14 2012

ET profiles five top technology companies that are on the path to firmly establish India as the product hub of the world:Druva, ITTIAM, Serial Innovations, Mistral, Inttelix Security are Â bagging global customers. Economic Times, Times of India June 8 2012

Linked In's user base has crossed the 15 million mark in India, according to country manager Hari V. Krishnan. India is LinkedIn Corp.’s largest market outside the US in terms of membership, currently accounting for 9.3% of the site’s overall user base of 161 million.MINT May 29 2012

In September last year, among the most downloaded gaming apps on the Research in Motion-controlled BlackBerry global network, was the game 'Pong Shot Reloaded'. There was nothing remarkable about what would have been just another popular game, except that it was developed in a tiny laboratory in Nagpur by an Indian gaming developer, Manthan Studios, not even two years into business at that time. The story is part of the development strategy for mobile developers, who now see India, the outsourcing destination till now as a haven for development as well. BUSINESS STANDARD May 28 2012

Former Science Adviser to late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and secretary of several major scientific departments, Ashok Parthasarathi, discusses "Many inconsistencies and contradictions" surrounding the Aakash educational tablet project. The Hindu May 21 2012

It was a fitting tribute to legendary filmmaker B Ramakrishna Panthulu when, as part of his birth centenary celebrations, the classic 1964 Tamil movie 'Karnan', starring the demigods of Tamil and Telugu cinema — Sivaji Ganesan and N T Rama Rao respectively — was re-released this year with top quality output.
Technology, or digital technology to be precise, proved once again the saviour. Tamil cinema, which has always greeted technology with open arms, has in the last few years surrendered to digital technology, in its various avatars. New Indian Express May 20 2012

Indiaâ€™s mobile-phone industry, once a symbol of rapid growth, is turning into something else: a demonstration of the difficulty of doing business there. Some telecom companies have left and others said they may follow.
India has rewritten tax rules, scrapped 122 licenses tainted by graft allegations and recommended charging 11 times more for airwaves in a bid to wrest more money from operators to help plug the widest budget deficit among the biggest emerging markets. BLOOMBERG May 9 2012

Splashgain Technologies (ST), a software firm has introduced an Android application, called ePravesh to help institutions and students to facilitate the admission process better. Free for those who've registered themselves with www.epravesh.com , the application provides students with admission details, like relevant information on brochures, course details and access to the respective school or college website among others. The application is available across all Android-enabledsmartphones. TECH2.in

The Blackberry is Corporate India's new blackboard. Since it is difficult to pin down busy employees and bring them to training sessions, companies are guiding them through their mobile phones -the only device accessed round the clock.
At Wipro Technologies, groups of employees will receive training modules in audio and video clips on their phones, which they can access anytime... ECONOMIC TIMES

Technology giant Adobe on Tuesday launched the latest version of its Creative Suite of products with enhanced functionalities and support for 10 Indian languages in its InDesign software in the country. Creative Suite is a collection of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications like Photoshop, Acrobat, InDesign and Illustrator.
Aimed specially at the professionals in designing, media and entertainment industries, the new software ‘Creative Suite 6’ (CS6) would be available in four suites -- Master Collection (Rs 1.56,000), Design and Web Premium, and Production Premium (Rs 1,14,000) each and Design Standard (Rs 78,288). PTI agency report in The Hindu April 25 2012

THE Montreal and London-based creator of the UbiSlate 7 (Aakash) tablet, announced the launch of two new seven inch low-cost tablets — the Ubislate 7+ and Ubislate 7C on April 26.
DataWind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli said, “We have now created a product that removes the barriers and levels the playing field (with other nations). TEHELKA

Sitting in a modest office, amongst a maze of rooms, dressed in grey trousers and white shirt, the CEO of online Business to Business (B2B) website, Indiamart, passionately talks only about the problems of his small and medium enterprise (SME) customers - handicrafts manufacturers, travel agents, apparel suppliers - and what the internet can do to facilitate trade for them. ECONOMIC TIMES April 26 2012

Infosys has always been accused of being conservative in its approach, though the company’s leadership has been in denial mode. That seems to be changing, with chief financial officer V Balakrishnan agreeing some amount of conservatism has indeed crept into the company in the recent past.
Speaking after the company’s comparatively dismal performance and weak revenue guidance last week, Balakrishnan, also a member of the Infosys board, however, defended the guidance as being ‘very realistic’. BUSINESS STANDARD

There really is nothing quite like the rush of picking up those brightly packaged products off the supermarket shelves and filling your cart with the month’s groceries—until you get to the half-hour-long weekend queue at the checkout counter.

But the sheen of the aisles is lost on Bangalore-based college lecturer Amrita Paul-Chakrabarty, who chanced upon online shopping a few months ago. “My weekends are now suddenly free,” she gushes. She switched to shopping at BigBasket.com four months ago and now orders from there at least once a week. MINT April 14 2012

Going for a tablet purchase? Don't let price points persuade you. Frugal innovation in tech may be grabbing headlines these days, but the bottom line remains very much the same — 'cheap ain't better'. The 'affordable' breed of tablet PCs are in stores, but their ilk may not be relied upon. BUSINESS STANDARD APRIL 9 2012

Rajesh Rao is among a handful of Indian entrepreneurs who may prevent the country's software industry from getting "Bangalored".
The 41-year-old self-confessed geek runs Dhruva, a firm that sells content and services to global online game companies from a bungalow in a crowded suburb of a city that has come to embody outsourcing and the transfer of jobs from the West.

But plain vanilla outsourcing - help desks and back office operations - is finding cheaper locations abroad. India's software industry has discovered it needs to move up the value chain or enter niche areas like gaming to continue growing....Raju Gopalakrishnan for REUTERS April 5 2012

Old king cash may have to take a bow. Plastic credit may find itself redundant. And 40 per cent of people who do not have bank accounts could leapfrog into the banking space. With mobile wallets, that's the change they are gunning for...BUSINESS STANDARD

Online retail in India could be a $84-billion industry by 2016 -- more than ten times its worth in 2010 -- and will account for 4.5 per cent of total retail. E-commerce entrepreneurs and experts say small-town India will play a big role in the online bonanza. Reuters report in Deccan Chroncle

An historic hundredth century by heroic cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar, overshadowed the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee's, less memorable fifth budget. But buried in the budget's text was an attempt to reverse the Supreme Court's judgment in the Vodafone tax case. That just isn't cricket.....The government could have licked its wounds and merely changed the law on future deals. Instead, reeling from the court's decision, it wants to retrospectively change the rules. REUTERS analysis, March 19 2012

One-sixth of the country, or 200 million Indians, don't possess any of the most basic assets like a transistor or TV, phone, vehicle of any kind or a computer. In three states - Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and MP- close to a third of the households own none of these assets. The Registrar General of India released the final figures for the first phase of Census 2011, known as the Houselisting and Housing Census. The data shows how India lives - how many people to a house, how they light their houses and where they get their water from, and some of the things they own. TIMES OF INDIA March 14 2012

Though half of all Indians do not have a toilet at home, well over half own a telephone, new census data released this week show.

These and many other contrasting facts of life have come out in Census 2011. The data on housing, household amenities and assets cast new light on a country in the throes of a complex transition, where millions have access to state-of-the-art technologies and consumer goods — but a larger number lacks access to the most rudimentary facilities. THE HINDU MARCH 14 2012

Cable operators are fighting, multi-system operators (MSOs) are lobbying, broadcasters are worrying and direct-to-home (DTH) operators are rubbing their hands in glee. So far the whole mandatory digitisation story in India is playing to script. With just under 90 days to go, how ready are we? BUSINESS STANDARD MARCH 13 2012

Lufthansa's LH 455, (is) a flght so legendary it has earned its own nickname: “The Bangalore Express.” The beginning of a day-long marathon between Silicon Valley and its counterpart in India, LH 455 (which connects in Frankfurt with LH 754 to Bangalore) turns into a tech convention even before it takes off. BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK March 8 2012

Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg said the wireless gear and solutions maker will be investing more in Indian mobile market for expanding facilities and resources.
The announcement is significant as the Indian telecom market is going through a tough phase due to delay in 3G expansion and 2G spectrum issues. Ericsson was one of the main telecom equipment makers in India that has added manpower significantly in 2011. TELECOM LEAD February 27 2012

NEW DELHI: India has the world's youngest internet population with 75 per cent of all users under the age of 35 years, said research firm comScore. In comparison to India, the world's average of under 35-year users stood at 52 per cent and 55 per cent in Asia Pacific region.
Further, a third of India's total online population is between 15 to 24 years... ECONOMIC TIMES February 24 2012

Philippines might have emerged as the new capital for call centre works, but the country still has a long way to go to match India in the overall business process outsourcing (BPO) segment not just in terms of size of the industry, but also in terms of range of services. According to various industry and analysts’ reports, Philippines has overtaken India in the voice-based BPO services delivery, but in the overall BPO category India still leads the pack with BPO exports of close to $15 billion. BUSINESS STANDARD Feb 24 2012

Pranav Mistry is easily among the hottest names in the technology space today. With a host of futuristic inventions to his credit, including the SixthSense technology.,..The 30-year-old MIT graduate demonstrated his SPARSH project at the Nasscom summit, demonstrating how it would be possible to copy data from a device by just a touch and then transfer it by simply touching another device, among other things.DNA Feb 16 2012

Seattle-based online retailer Amazon, which is considered to be the largest online retailer globally, seems to be making deeper inroads into India and wants to hire atleast 5,000 people at its facility in Hyderabad. At the moment, there are almost 4,000 employees working for the company’s R&D and tech support division from the city. Amazon is also looking at setting its logistics centre in Hyderabad and had chosen it over Bangalore. This could be the next step after it establishes base in its own premise. Financial Chronicle Feb 15 2012

Days after the big bang launch of the Aakash tablet by the government, doubts were raised over its efficiency and durability. If experts of the industry are to be believed, technical flaws, no hands-on experience, and the total cost of procuring it make the much-hyped gadget a disappointment for the buyers. FINANCIAL CHRONICLE FEBRUARY 14 2012

Hackers, allegedly belonging to a Chinese group called Evil Shadow Team, struck at www.microsoftstore.co.in on Sunday night, stealing login ids and passwords of people who had used the website for shopping Microsoft products. TIMES OF INDIA Feb. 13 2012

NEW DELHI: For a generation that has learnt to articulate thoughts in 140 characters and knows its smartphones and tabs, e-textbooks are only the next step. But some infrastructure bottlenecks need to be taken care of before that education revolution takes place in India, experts say. IANS wire story in Times of India, February 8 2012

Mobile phones seem to be ringing incessantly in rural India. Of the total 884 million mobile connections in the country, 303 million are in the rural space. The segment contributes, on an average, 40 per cent of the total 2 million connections added each month in the country. NEW INDIAN EXPRESS January 29 2012

Sam Pitroda, the advisor to the Indian Prime Minister on public information, infrastructure and innovation, in an interview, says:
"Nobody can control the internet. It is impossible. We cannot go the China way. Even China is not going the 'China way'".ECONOMIC TIMES, JanuARY 24, 2012

There is no way we can screen content before it is posted online, argued Internet behemoths Google and Facebook in the Delhi High Court on Monday (16 January), reported NDTV.

Both these Internet companies are among 21 whose executives have been summoned to appear in person in a lower court on March 13 for allegedly hosting obscene and objectionable content. Last week, 12 of the companies involved in this case said they are headquartered internationally. PCWorld India Jan 19 2012

Aakash, the $45 tablet PC promoted by the ministry of human resource development (HRD), is mired in controversy three months after it was launched as a tool that would enable India to bridge the digitaldivide. Suneet Singh Tuli, chief executive of DataWind, spoke about the project in an interview. MINTJanuary 17 2012

Not many days back, DataWind was flying high on the success of Aakash but things changed overnight. The company is facing a tough time as it seems to have lost 'support' from the Government. DataWind now not only has the challenge to complete the order of 100,000 pieces of Aakash but has to supply the upgraded devices as well.EFY Times January 18 2012

India is emerging as global hub on animation and visual effects with experts from all over the world working in Indian post production companies, says Mr Rob Hoffman, Senior Product Marketing Manager (3D, Media & Entertainment) at Autodesk Inc, a US-based company, which provides 3D design, engineering and entertainment software that are used by the experts.Hindu Businessline January 12 2012

In the first trials, which started before the launch and were spread over a six-month period, Aakash was found to be wanting in processor speed, the quality of its touch screen and battery life, among other issues MINT Jan 14 2012

Robots plays a major role in treating cancer of the kidney, bladder and prostate and doing reconstructive procedures in a minimally invasive manner. Hospitals can use robots for valve replacements and for extended bypass surgery of the heart. Robotic surgery can also be used in urology, gastrointestinal surgery and gynaecological procedures....DNA December 30 2011

The National Film Archives has managed to restore and digitise films of Dadasaheb Phalke, Satyajit Ray, Mehboob Khan, and V. Shantaram, among others. Many other filmmakers, however, have not been so lucky....The digital restoration and preservation has just started in most laboratories in India. THE HINDU December 26 2011

Within days of Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi throwing his might behind the unique identification number project, the parliamentary standing committee on finance axed it, calling it “a scheme conceptualised with no clarity of purpose”. It will be difficult for the UPA government to recover from this outright rejection. DNA December 14 2011

For the US-based NComputing, a desktop virtualisation company with 30 lakh ( 3 million) NComputing access devices deployed in 140 countries, India is the highest growth market and is second only to the US in terms of revenue. “In three years of our operation in India, we have recorded 150 per cent growth year-over-year. So far we have a total of 500,000 devices installed across educational institutions, small and medium businesses and among enterprises,” said Will Poole, co-chairman and president of NComputing. FINANCIAL CHRONICLE DEC 13 2011.

Global investors have placed a billion dollar bet on India's Internet and mobile start-ups during 2011, reposing confidence in the fast-growing base of digital consumers in the country. Marquee venture capital and private equity investors made aggressive investments in start-ups - most of which are less than five-year old - as they backed the story of rising disposable income and Internet penetration.TIMES OF INDIA DEC 13 2011

Ever since 26/11, India has made massive purchases of communications intelligence equipment from secretive companies from India and abroad. In the absence of effective legal oversight, it threatens the democracy it was bought to defend. THE Hindu Dec 2 2011

Americans calling the customer service lines of their airlines, phone companies and banks are now more likely to speak to Mark in Manila than Bharat in Bangalore. Over the last several years, a quiet revolution has been reshaping the call center business: the rise of the Philippines, a former United States colony that has a large population of young people who speak lightly accented English and, unlike many Indians, are steeped in American culture. NEW YORK TIMES Nov 25 2011

Canadian firm Research In Motion (RIM) has announced the launch of three new handsets based on its BlackBerry 7 operating system in the country.

With this, RIM now has seven handsets in India based on the latest operating system, which it claims has faster performance, enhanced browsing and richer multimedia compared to its predecessor. ECONOMIC TIMES November 24 2011

Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 as a free, open-content online encyclopediaarrived in Mumbai on Nov 17 to inaugurate the three-day WikiConference India. Speaking to the large audience of delegates who filled every corner of the grand convocation hall of the University of Mumbai, Wales said this was probably the largest WikiConference ever held. He added, that he was ‘incredibly lucky’ to be in India, not just because he almost could not make it, but also because Wikipedia is looking at great opportunities in Indian languages. DNS Nov 19 2011

Fierce competition, ambitious parents, a dearth of teachers are driving private schools to pay for a slew of products and services offered by firms.. a trend that may widen the inequalities of the education system. For example, software developed by US-based Waterford Early Learning that teaches four-year-olds how to spell and pronounce words; online tutorials in mathematics developed by Ahmedabad-based Math Buddy; and testing services from Educational Initiatives, also based in Ahmedabad.. Radhika Raj investigates...The Hindustan Times Nov 20 2011

LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, on Tuesday opened a research and development centre in Bangalore, the first such facility outside of the US.
Located at the Bagmane Tech Park, the LinkedIn Technology Centre will be the company's fourth office in the country after its India headquarters in Mumbai and sales offices in Gurgaon and Bangalore. Out of over 135 million subscribers of LinkedIn, over 12 million are from India. Times of India Nov 15 2011

Internet giant Google's Chromebook, the much-celebrated mobile device tailor-made for Web browsing and running on its Chrome Operating System, is likely to be shipped in India by early 2012.
Speaking to presspersons at an interaction here, Sundar Pichai, senior vice-president, Chrome and Apps, Google, said: “I would be very surprised if Chromebooks are not shipped in India by early 2012. We see India as a huge potential market for us. The Hindu Nov 16 2011

Hyderabad as an investment destination appears to be rapidly going the canine way and it's no wonder that it is perhaps the only mega city in the world where a majority, if not all, buildings have meshes around them to prevent damage to assets. The permanent asset, namely Brand Cyberabad, is rapidly fading away from the global investment map. TIMES OF INDIA Nov 6 2011

In Silicon Valley, the heart of the US technology industry, immigrants had founded more than half of the companies started in the previous 10 years .... says Eric Schurenberg. He quotes Harvard and Duke University professor Vivek Wadhwa: “The US is giving an unintentional gift to China and India by causing highly educated and skilled workers, frustrated by long waits for visas, to return home...." MINT Oct 28 2011

Information technology industry seems to have learned to live with confusion and uncertainty prevailing in the State Capital over the Telangana statehood issue . It doesn't mean that there are no worries and that it is business as usual here.

They continue to worry over embarrassing queries from clients as they deliberate on deals for the next financial year. Absenteeism because of lack of public transport, too, has become a pain in the neck. Hindu Businessline Oct15 2011

A paradigm shift is nigh for India’s television distribution industry, where for years unscrupulous local cable operators have under-declared subscriptions, causing huge revenue losses to broadcasters and platforms. DNA Oct 14 2011

Wipro Technologies has identified education and health care as the next big business opportunities as it prepares to launch a host of low-cost products such as an electro-cardiogram necklace, tablet computer and cameras for use in hospitals and in mining and retail. ECONOMIC TIMES Oct 11 2011

No Indian university made it in an annual list of the world’s top 200 universities. High up in the survey, put together by the Times Higher Education magazine, were many of the much-lauded institutions– including Harvard, Stanford and Oxford.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, widely regarded as India’s most prestigious engineering and technology school, does appear in the ranking—but not in the top 200 WALL ST JOURNAL OCT 9 2011

For most Indians living in poverty, their interaction with technology is minimal. But now, every Indian has the opportunity to have their irises and fingerprints scanned using cutting-edge technology. This is part of the government’s massive effort to give every Indian citizen a biometric, 12 digit identity card. If successful, India will become the only country in the world with a universal biometric identity system. CNN Oct 4 2011

Avnet Technology Solutions, the technology solutions distribution company and an operating group of Avnet introduced CloudReady Program, an initiative designed to prepare and enable channel partners to capitalize on emerging cloud computing growth opportunities in India.

CloudReady covers all the three facets of cloud computing namely private, public and hybrid, and offers partners tools and resources to enter the cloud computing market quickly, implement cloud-based solutions and profitably grow their business. COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS (CRN.in) September 19 2011

The Board of Control for Cricket in India have reverted to their firm stance against the use of the Decision Review System, with the new board president N Srinivasan saying they did not wish to use the DRS in its present form. While most countries have been quick to embrace the umpire referrals - and the technology that underpins them - the game's political heavyweights India have been vocal in their lack of enthusiasm. DAILY MAIL (UK) Sep 19 2011

Several months ago, when Prabhu Kumar could not find a book he wanted in bookstores here, he found it online at Amazon.com for $10. But he had to pay more than $9 in fees to have Amazon ship it to him. Mr. Kumar, a software programmer, said he would not be doing that again. He now shops on India’s answer to Amazon — FlipKart.com — which delivers books, phones and other items in as little as 24 hours at no extra cost. Mr. Kumar doesn’t have to pay FlipKart a single rupee until a courier bearing his books arrives at his door. He can then hand over cash or a credit card. NEW YORK TIMES Sep 14 2011

French information technology services company Capgemini and US-based consulting, technology and outsourcing service provider Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) are in the fray to acquire independent software testing company AppLabs.

Based out of Philadelphia, AppLabs has close to 1,800 employees at its global delivery centre in Hyderabad. Business Standard. Sep 10 2011

Users of the Indian social network SMS GupShup send four billion messages per month, accounting for about 10 percent of India’s texting traffic.
That volume is impressive, but it’s also expensive. Four-year-old SMS GupShup was forced to figure out a business model for mobile social networking before its global peers — like Twitter, and more recently, GroupMe — because it had to pay its ever-growing bills.....Wall St Journal ;Mossberg Review blogs Aug 30

An average Indian smartphone user spends about two-and-half hours a day on the handset, dedicating more time to entertainment and internet activities than to voice calls and text messages, says a survey.

According to a Nielsen-Informate Mobile Intelligence survey, Indian smartphone user spends 72 per cent of the time on activities such as gaming, entertainment, applications (apps) and internet related content The Hindu Aug 6 2011

Anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare ruled Indian cyberspace during his fast demanding introduction of Jan Lokpal Bill in Parliament. Search engine Google produces 29 million results when a query is made by entering Anna Hazare’s name, while Sonia Gandhi’s name yields a little below 9 million results.

A page created in the Facebook on Anna Hazare has been liked by 3.64 lakh users against UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s page which has 57, 291 likes. Press Trust of India sourced from The Hindu Aug 29 2011

Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corporation on Thursday announced it has established India as the company's global experts resource hub.
As the global resource hub, ZTE India, a wholly owned subsidiary of ZTE Corporation, will serve as a key technical resource provider for ZTE's operations and subsidiaries in other countries as the company continues to scale up its global growth. Hindu Businessline Aug 18 2011

MoFirst is tapping India’s next wave in outsourcing, with thousands of programmers that charge a fraction of Silicon Valley prices to capitalise on demand for programmes for Apple Inc’s iPhone and devices running Google Inc’s Android software. Developers-for-hire for mobile applications may generate $5.6 billion in revenue by 2015, a 14-fold jump from this year, Forrester Research Inc estimates..... Mint/BLOOMBERG Aug 25 2011

In branded clothes, their ID cards hanging out of pockets, the typical techies of Electronic City (Bangalore), were not sitting in office, pounding on their laptops on Tuesday afternoon. They were out on the roads, shouting slogans and holding placards in support of the nationwide movement against corruption.

This act made Justice Santosh Hegde remark to the gathering at Electronic City: "I was under the impression that you are people who lived only for yourself. For once I am glad that I am proved wrong."TIMES OF INDIA AUG 17 2011

Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL), New Delhi, has tied up with Akmin Technologies Pvt Ltd to launch mobile website builder service.
MTNL's mobile website builder is a unique service that allows a non-technical user to create and publish a customized website within minutes using his mobile phone or PC. TIMES OF INDIA Aug 8 2011

India's technology sector is bracing for a potential slowdown in growth after the historic U.S. credit downgrade over the weekend, which heightened fears of a double-dip recession in the largest outsourcing market and sparked a sell-off in IT stocks.
Indian technology companies earn more than 80% of their revenue from the U.S. and Europe. WALL ST JOURNAL AUG 9 2011

For two e-commerce pioneers,creating and selling off has been the dominant pattern of their entrepreneurial journey.Anand Rajaraman (38) and Venky Harinarayan (44) had started Kosmix about six years back,only to be snapped up by the worlds biggest retail firm last April.Walmart acquired Kosmix because the firm had a social media platform for filtering and organising social network content,called the Social Genome. ECONOMIC TIMES Aug 2 2011.

In 2007, Bansal buddies Sachin (29) and Binny (28) dug into their personal savings and put together Rs 400,000 to start an online bookstore, which they called flipkart.com. They knew it was not a new idea and if they were not going to have a big differentiator, the venture carried a high risk of joining the ranks with failed dot.com start-ups that promised so much but delivered so little.
Today the buzz is that the four year old company, a deep discount online market place for books and digital accessories, is close to selling a portion of its equity to a leading US-based private equity player that has valued the company at $1 billion...HINDUSTAN TIMES July 31 2011

Preventing animals in forests from crossing over into human habitations, creating an alert when poaching takes place and detecting unwarranted cutting of trees in forests — these are some of the features of a complex but ambitious wireless sensor-based system that scientists from Indian Institute of Information Technology (Allahabad), Indian Institute of Sciences (Bangalore) and a couple of universities from the US are working on to protect wildlife and forests. A team comprising scientists from IIITA, IISc and Wildlife Institute of India, Dehra Dun, had visited Panna National Park in Madhya Pradesh in May to assess the feasibility of such a project on the ground. INDIAN EXPRESS Aug 1 2011

BOSTON – Two Indian-origin girls have emerged winners at Google’s inaugural Science Fair, impressing thousands at the internet giant’s California headquarters with their projects on ways to improve ovarian cancer treatment and bettering air quality for the benefit of asthma patients. July 22 2011

India is the next big frontier for multinational media firms, and although the country’s laws prevent them from taking a significant stake in mainstream news publications and channels, there’s no bar on launching India-specific websites, even if they are fully owned by the company. Following the entry of The Wall Street Journal’s digital imprint into India two years ago, at least two key media organizations may be getting ready to follow suit soon.
The New York Times plans to launch an India-specific online edition..... MINT July 21 2011

What documents do we submit to apply for a PAN card? How does one get an educational loan? How does one apply for a passport? Log on to www.wikifyindia.com. and help is at hand. This website, a non-profit initiative, is an aspiring encyclopaedia of government procedures in India. The Hindu Metroplus July 6 2011

The Indian PC market is bursting at the seams with startups coming out with new launches and companies like Spice Telecom, Bharti Teletech and Micromax planning to introduce their own tablet PC versions. Another new launch to grace the Indian market is the ‘Marathon’ tablet PC by EAFT (Everything At Finger Tips) Technologies, which headquartered in Bangalore. Marathon, their latest product offering promises to give you the best web and multimedia experience through first of its kind 3D User Interface! MY BANGALORE July 13 2011

It’s official. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the new information technology bellwether, not Infosys Technologies.
It took the Tata firm five straight quarters of outperforming Infosys on volume, or the number of hours billed to clients, and six straight quarters of better employee retention (see chart) to get here. DNA July 15 2011

Don't look for an Indian "Avatar" anytime soon, but Bollywood, inspired by the success of blockbusters such as "Transformers," is starting to take special effects seriously. Up until five years ago, producers were unwilling to embrace technology, preferring instead to spend millions on expensive outdoor shoots and sets. That changed when India became a viable back-end destination for Hollywood films like "Tron" and "Avatar" amid a growing wave of outsourcing post-production special effects due to cost. The number of studios handling VFX -- visual effects that include mixes of live-action footage and computer-generated images -- mushroomed. Reuters story from IBN Live July 7 2011

Compared with 15-20 megahertz (MHz) per operator in the US and Europe, Indian operators have just 5 MHz of spectrum. And, no Indian telecom operator has 3G spectrum in all the 22 telecom circles. In the best case scenario, operators such as Airtel and Reliance Communications own spectrum in 13 circles, but for the rest, like other operators, they are also forced to enter into agreements with peers/ competitors. DNA July 8 2011

A three-woman team from the Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) here has developed an application for Windows Phone 7, named the 'Immunisation Tracker'.
Also referred to as a 'Code for Her', it's a Windows Phone 7 application aimed at making a mother's life easier on vaccinations for a child; it, clearly, can be used for other reminder-applications on what a child needs. BUSINESS STANDARD June 29 2011

To enable easy access to cost effective business productivity solutions on the cloud, Microsoft Corporation on Wednesday announced commercial availability of Microsoft Office 365 in India. This cloud based office suite could be availed at price $2 per user per month, (excluding applicable taxes), which would allow SMBs and enterprise customers to access Microsoft’s popular e-mail, collaboration, conferencing and productivity capabilities online. GOVERNANCE NOW June 29 2011

What you need: A unique idea. Little or no investment. A few hours. What you get: A global market of over 250 million smart phone and tablet users. A time share in 33,675 downloads a minute, or 17.7 billion a year. ET on Sunday spoke to the Indian app-preneurs with global hits in their kitty. They share some everyday challenges: lack of adequate talent. Some unique ones: making money from freeware. But collectively, they can't stop gushing about the hottest new business. And explaining why the next Angry Birds may come from their research labs. ECONOMIC TIMES on Sunday June 26 2011

Very few companies manage such longevity, less so now when changes in market and technology environments are so rapid. Anticipating and managing those changes is complex. And yet, that’s what the $100-billion computing giant, IBM done. And it’s been visible in India too over the past decade, in its phenomenal success in turning the country into its primary global delivery services centre, replicating the model pioneered by Indian software companies, and its equally extraordinary accomplishment in winning by far the largest share of the Indian IT services market.
TOI reported last year that IBM is one of India’s biggest employers, perhaps bigger than even Infosys, though lower than TCS.... Sujit John in The Times of India June 16 2011

Putting the onus of re-cycling of electronic wastes (e-waste) on the producers, the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) has for the first time notified e-waste management rules.

The e-waste (management and handling) Rules, 2011 would recognise the producers’ liability for recycling and reducing e-waste in the country. The rules will come into effect from May 1, 2012. BUSINESS STANDARD JUNE 9 2011

With its vast workforce, thriving chip design sector and burgeoning demand of electronics, India should be an attractive base for semiconductor makers, but its efforts to establish an international manufacturing hub have so far been a flop.

"Fab City", an industrial park on the outskirts of Hyderabad, was launched amid much hype in 2007, with the government offering tax breaks and capital subsidies to chip makers to set up operations there.

Since then, the proposed investment has dwindled from $9.5 billion for planned semiconductor and solar cell plants to less than $3 billion, with no semiconductor makers left on board. REUTERS June 9 2011

Lenovo, the personal computer (PC) maker with its business strategy of 'protect & attack', is slowly but firmly making inroads into the Indian market. The company launched here on June 6 the ThinkPad X1, which it claimed is the slimmest notebook in the enterprise or business segment.( It costs around Rs 85,000 - ed) CIOL News June 6 2011

Not only will it (Nividia's India R&D) contribute to the next generation Wayne, to be out in 2012, the centre will lead the work on Logan, targeted for a 2013 release. “We will be spearheading it. Up to 80% of the work will be done out of here,” said Sridhar Manthani, senior director, research and development, Nvidia. MINT June 2 2011

The US-based Federal Insurance Co, part of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, has tied up with HDFC ERGO to introduce a product that will cover cyber crimes in India. Chubb launched its cyber security insurance policy globally in 2009. “The service was launched in Asia in 2010 and we hope to bring it to India this year,” Mr Noel Tan, Regional Manager, Chubb Specialty Insurance, Southeast Asia, Middle East and India, told Business Line. June 2 2011

Four employees of Wipro quit over the last few months to devote their time to prop up the floundering dairy sector. They are in the final stages of readying the prototype of a cloud-based computing system to help farmers increase organic milk production, cut adulteration and pilferage, and track reproduction cycles of cattle in a scientific way. The system involves the use of sensors, including some on the body of cows. The data collected will be used to increase the quality and quantity of milk produced, and let vets know the right time to artificially inseminate the cows.Bangalore Mirror May 24 2011

Scytl, a premier provider of secure remote voting technology worldwide, has announced that it has successfully conducted the first Internet elections in the Indian State of Gujarat. This is a major step in India’s electoral history as citizens were able to vote through the Internet for the first time ever.

The State of Gujarat is using Scytl’s Internet voting technology with the aim to boost voter participation and avoid traditional long queues. The first binding trial was carried out in September 2010 and online voting was successfully used for the second time last month, during Gandhinagar’s Municipal Corporation elections, where 77,16% of registered evoters cast their vote electronically - either from home or from e-voting booths. SYS-CON and agencies May 22 2011

A new facility for students and faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston, built with a one million-dollar grant from Labour peer Swraj Paul, was opened on Friday (May 13 2011) and will be the new home for its School of Management.

The grant was made through the Ambika Paul Foundation, set up by Lord Paul in 1978 in memory of his daughter Ambika who died of leukaemia in 1968 at the age of four. The Hindu May 14 2011

The top 10 India-based IT services providers saw a reacceleration in growth in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. The top 10 Indian providers grew 19.9 percent, compared with 5.8 percent for the worldwide top 10 IT service providers and 3.1 percent growth for the global market.
Gartner analysts said these results reinforce that India's IT services providers are well out of downturn times and back on their growth trajectory. INFORMATION WEEK May 12 2011

Nokia’s recent decision to outsource development of Symbian software — the operating system which runs its handsets — to Accenture, has put 200,000 Indian software programmers in turmoil.As part of the deal, Nokia is also transferring 3,000 employees — 700 of them from Bangalore — to Accenture. Indian Symbian programmers, who are not Nokia employees but independently develop mobile applications (mobile apps) for its handsets, say they also face an uncertain future.... DECCAN Herald May 6 2011

Tulip Telecom has announced that it has chosen IT major IBM and data centre consultant Schnabel to establish a data centre in Bengaluru [ Images ], which the company said will be India's largest and the world's third-largest data centre. Times of India/ rediff.com

With the popularity of social networking and texting threatening to turn thumb gymnastics into a competitive sport, schoolchildren are getting less activity with each passing day. The result is one in three teenagers weighing more than they should, a number that grows by an average of 1% each year. Now there's linear data to prove it. A comparison between 14-17 year olds across one dozen private and government schools in Delhi shows that obesity in teenagers is up by 2% over four years, with rich children in private schools recording an over 5% jump, from 11.6% in 2006 to 15.9% in 2009. HINDUSTAN TIMES April 24 2011

BridgeCo, a pioneer and world leader in digital audio and media networking technologies has decided to make India its global hub with over 90% of its operations in Bangalore, India. BridgeCo is a semiconductor company that provides the most comprehensive processor and software solution for connecting consumer electronic products to the internet. BridgeCo also designs and develops chips & software for the world’s most popular products at their base in Bangalore PR LOG Apeil 12 2011

The penetration of the internet in rural areas will see an all time high this year. In a survey conducted by IMRB for the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the total number of active internet users in rural area will rise by 98 per cent to touch 24 million by the end of this year from 12.1 million in December 2010.
The survey said that the claimed internet user category is also set to grow by 96 per cent to reach 29.9 million by December 2011 from 15.2 million in December 2010. BUSINESS STANDARD, April 13 2011

Ascendas is bringing on board Thomas Teo, a veteran of Ascendas in Singapore to take the reins of India operations at the International Tech Park in Whitefield, Bangalore. BUSINESS STANDARD April 7 2011

IT major Wipro Technologies has acquired the oil and gas information technology practice of US-based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for $150 million (about Rs 670 crore). It's Wipro's second biggest acquisition in the IT space, the largest being its $600 mn takeover of Infocrossing.

SAIC is a $10-billion scientific, engineering, and technology applications company. It has a subsidiary in India that operates in Noida and Bangalore. SAIC's oil and gas information technology practice provides consulting, system integration and outsourcing services to global oil and gas majors involved in upstream activities. TIMES OF INDIA APRIL 2 2011

The Indian government has announced an energy efficiency label for laptops.
The Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) on Wednesday announced the BEE Star Label version 1 for laptops. The guidelines announced by BEE are based on United Sates Energy version 5 guidelines. INDIAN EXPRESS March 30 2011

Indian corporates having presence in Japan (have) accelerated the evacuation exercise, as the radiation crisis deepened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the eastern coast of the quake-hit nation. Business Standard March 17 2011

Even as Microsoft’s browser rules the roost when it comes to the number of users, Google Chrome users displayed loyalty with only 35 per cent switch-outs.

With no clear preference when it comes to browsers, Microsoft and Google are targeting Indian internet users to have greater share of the market. A Juxt study estimates the average Indian internet subscriber uses 2.3 browsers and the duplicate user base in browser usage stands at 31 per cent.

A Statcounter study says Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) leads with a 44.26 per cent share in India, followed by Firefox at 32.53 per cent and Chrome at the third position, with a 19.61 per cent share.

CheersBye.com, a travel portal linking travellers directly with the websites of hotels, serviced apartments, homestays, restaurants, event halls, shopping, entertainment and nightlife, has been launched recently. Being the commission-free booking hub, travellers will have access to the hotel's own best available rates, thereby saving significantly, besides getting a wider choice. It is a one-stop-shop for accessing the best rates in any chosen destination. CheersBye.com plans to go global featuring international hotels. The Hindu March 11 2011

As many as seven out of 10 Indian internet users watch online video and half of them use YouTube . They watch 58 videos for a total of 5 hours a month on average and the numbers of viewers are nearly the same as in the UK or Brazil.

ComScore Inc , a leader in measuring digital world habits, found that 30.2 million online users in India watched online videos in January 2011, representing 72% of the total online population. Economic Times March 11 2011

India’s largest IT services provider, TCS, is stepping into an unchartered territory by targeting the small and medium enterprises. As part of its SME Cloud offering, launched in mid-February, TCS will now also focus on firms in the revenue bracket of Rs 10 crore to Rs 500 crore. Business Standard March 8 2011

The blocking of a blogging website, even if only for a short period, raises the disturbing question of curbs imposed on free speech in India through executive fiat. There is a clear pattern of Internet censorship that is inconsistent with constitutional guarantees on freedom of expression. It is also at odds with citizen aspirations in the age of new media. The Hindu March 7 2011

Computer-maker HP may be forced to stop production at its Pantnagar plant as the Budgetary announcement of an excise duty increase on PC components may eat into margins while making imports of desktops and laptops cheaper. Economic Times March 4 2011

NEW YORK: BMW has partnered with three Indians that have created a mobile phone application called MyCityWay, which helps people find everything from a place to eat to the closest park to relax in. BMW has invested $5 million in the company. "I am thrilled to announce that we have just signed our first strategic partnership with MyCityWay," Ian Robertson, responsible for sales and marketing at BMW, said in Munich recently. "As a mobile app, MyCityWay provides users with information on public transportation, parking availability, and local entertainment for over 40 cities in the US.Press Trust of India May 3 2011 in Business Sandard

Banks have not taken the full advantage of technology for bringing down the cost of small transactions, improving customer services and an effective flow of information within banks and with the regulator, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has said.

“One of the shortcomings that has been observed is a disconnect between the information and technology. Although banks have deployed technology for transaction processing, the same has not been explored extensively for analytical processing,” the regulator said in its IT Vision document for 2011-17.BUSINESS STANDARD March 2 2011

IEEE, an association of global technical professionals, today said it will set up an office at Bangalore as it looks to expand its presence in Asia.The association currently has 23,000 member base in the country. The new office will enable IEEE to further support engineering and technical professionals in India through a variety of educational and certification programmes, it said. The Indian office in Bangalore will be the fourth in Asia after Singapore, China and Japan , ECONOMIC TIMES March 2 2011

IN 2008, three young guys in Manhattan started Ignighter.com, a dating Web site focused on twentysomethings. They sought to set themselves apart by enabling members to set up group dates:.......“In January 2010, we made the decision that we are an Indian dating site,” Mr. Sachs says. And now, with almost two million users — and 7,000 more signing up daily — Ignighter is considered India’s fastest-growing dating Web site. NYT Feb 19 2011

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), India’s largest information technology (IT) services company, launched a subscription-based cloud service for small and medium businesses that aims at $1 billion (Rs.4,550 crore) revenue in five years.

The pay-per-use service called iON, aimed at covering a small company’s spectrum of IT needs, has been running as a pilot with about 130 businesses to fine-tune the offering over the last one year. Mint Feb 16 2011

Sales of personal computers in India rose 30 percent in 2010, the highest in four years, as consumer and commercial demand strenghtened after two years of negative growth, research firm IDC said .Sales of personal computers in Oct-Dec grew by 2.49 million units, a 26 percent jump compared with the previous year. Feb 16 2011

Features like long battery life, ease of use and the rapid development of applications are attracting companies to tablet PCs....Back in India, Magesh Ramamurthy, IT Director at Four Seasons Hotels, saw something more in the iPad that made sense: He saw it as a device to engage customers effectively. Quickly, Ramamurthy deployed two iPads at the hotel's front desk and tested customer reaction when the hotel staff began screening the rooms and facilities available on the tablet PC's 10-inch screen. Business Standard Feb 7 2011

Students with creative ideas need no longer fear they are not going to be taken seriously. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is all out to tap their innovative ideas. Plans include a techno park close to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai, where defence scientists will work with students on the products.

The move follows the success of Netra, the unmanned aerial vehicle. The prototype for Netra was developed by students of the IIT, Bombay. Netra is now at the mass production stage. DNA Feb 10 2011

India's premier technical institute, the IITs, will now make all their engineering courses and lectures available for downloads to students, even on their mobile phones.

Students can access the lectures of IITs, IISc and NITs from the NPTEL website www.nptel.iitm.ac.in and from YouTube www.youtube.com/iit . The 125 courses available include lectures both in web and in video format in electrical, mechanical, civil and computer science engineering.Feb 10 2011

Religare Technologies , one of India’s leading healthcare technology companies, on Monday announced the launch of HealthLine 24x7 - India’s first phone and web-based healthcare information assistance service.
HealthLine 24x7 is a health information helpline and assistance platform that offers identical yet complementary service over two channels - voice media through phone and digital media through the internet. The service is absolutely free and 24x7x365. Feb 7 2011

The information technology unit of India's Wipro Ltd., announced a major organizational shake-up to more effectively address demand for outsourcing services as the software exporter struggles to retain its crumbling market share.
Wipro--India's third largest software exporter by sales--said it is realigning its operations into six business units--energy and utilities; finance solutions; media and telecom; pharmaceutical, healthcare and life sciences; manufacturing and hi-tech; and retail, consumer goods, transportation and government. Feb 7 2011

The recent performance of Indian IT majors indicates quicker recovery from recession and stronger profit growth, analyses Dilip Maitra
Software engineers in India, with at least two to three years of experience, are in great demand, thanks to the revival in the fortunes of the Indian IT industry. Rising from the ripple effect of the global recession from 2008 till the middle of 2010 that adversely impacted hiring of engineers, Indian IT companies are now on a massive hiring spree. Salaries too are skyrocketing as companies are vying with each other to hire and retain the best brains.

Back in India, where I grew up, my dad was an officer in the Indian railway system, and he used to take me inside the locomotives to see how they worked: there was the fireman, sweating and pitch-dark from the coal and dust and noise, shoveling coal into the fire as fast as he could... And next to him was the engineer, and he's trying to watch hundreds of dials and knobs and levers all at the same time to try to keep the train going 40 kilometers per hour.
"And a few years ago, my dad came to visit me in Germany and we took the ICE train from Cologne and that train had a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour. We enter the front compartment and there the driver sat, smoking a cigarette and calmly talking to another driver without even looking at the instrument panel.. INFORMATION WEEK...

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) reiterated on Thursday that it would not provide intelligence agencies access to its its enterprise email services.... "There is no possibility of us providing any kind of a solution," said Robert E Crow, vice-president, industry, government and university relations, RIM. "There are no keys to be handed...It's not possible to do so because the keys of the service are in possession of the corporate enterprises."

India is all set to leave its foot printsin the most talked about event that is coming up -The London Olympic Games 2012. Atos Origin (India),an international IT services company will play a lead role in delivering technology for the London Games 2012. Also Atos Origin contract with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is the world's largest sports related IT contract till date.SILICON INDIA Jan 21 2011

India’s Wipro, the software services exporter, overhauled the management of its outsourcing business after reporting profit growth in its most recent quarter that lagged its rivals.

Wipro has been struggling to win big contracts as the sector recovers from the global downturn, and its shares and margins have suffered compared with its larger rivals, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys. REUTERS Jan 21 2011

Infosys Technologies said it will appeal an income tax department order demanding India's No.2 software firm pay 4.57 billion rupees ($100 million) in tax for work done onshore.

In an email to Reuters, Infosys chief financial officer V. Balakrishnan termed the order arbitrary.

Earlier on Tuesday, The Economic Times reported that the tax authority, in the order issued a fortnight ago, refused to acknowledge onshore services as software exports, thus making them ineligible for tax benefits. REUTERS Jan 18 2011

HCL Technologies Ltd. is betting on emerging markets to drive its revenue growth over the next several years, a senior executive said, as developed countries in the West continue to grapple with economic uncertainties.
Indian information technology companies such as New Delhi-based HCL Technologies get most of their business from the U.S. and Europe by offering services like computer software and back-office support at a fraction of cost their clients in developed markets would locally incur.
But, budget cuts by traditional customers, the European debt crisis and a slow recovery in the U.S. have made these IT companies to diversity their markets, especially into countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America where several economies are growing at a fast pace again WALL STREET JOURNAL Jan 18 2011

The three-volume encyclopedia on the A to Z of Indian music across 2000 years, the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Music of India released recently, will soon be available in digital format.

"We are preparing a digital version of the book in the US. It will be more versatile and will be available to people all over the world through the Oxford reference shelf," Oxford University Press India's Managing Director Manzar Khan said here.

A team from the Oxford University Press and Sangit Mahabharati, a Mumbai-based music academy, worked for 12 years to compile the encyclopedia, which has more than 5,000 entries on music, dance, vocalists, accompanists, poets and musicologists. INDIAN EXPRESS JANUARY 11 2011

It is no secret that Phaneesh Murthy, CEO of iGATE, has for sometime now wanted to take his company into the big league - a $1-billion annual revenue was the benchmark for that goal.

On earlier occasions he has revealed, his ambition to make iGATE a 25,000-employee company, through acquisitions. The announcement that his company is buying a majority stake in Patni Computers marks a milestone, what with the latter's annual revenues of $689 million and iGATE's $252 million.HINDU BUSINESSLINE Jan 11 2011

In a bid to tap the rural e-commerce market across the country, the Ahmedabad-based Infibeam.com is set to launch Vishwagram Bazaar soon. At an investment of Rs 2000 crore over five years, Infibeam plans to build an e-commerce retail platform where rural consumers can have access to FMCG as well as products not easily available to rural households at transparent prices. BUSINESS STANDARD Jan 14 2011

Two possible outcomes loomed over the BlackBerry battles in India, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in recent months: Either local intelligence agencies get to snoop at messages from the handsets, or governments will shut them down.

An Indian entrepreneur says he has invented a third way, however, which threatens to complicate the efforts by Canadian manufacturer Research In Motion Ltd. to expand overseas.He called his service Bharat Berry

In an e-mailed statement, RIM dismissed the Bharat Berry as unimportant.But analyst Ashok Kumar, with Rodman & Renshaw, said this kind of technology could prove disruptive .. “It will resonate in places where price is front and centre." (TORONTO) GLOBE & MAIL Jan 3 2011

IIT-Madras plans to set up a centre of excellence for VLSI (very-large-scale integration) design and microchip making. A blue print on this will be ready in the next six months, according to Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-Madras.The HINDU Jan 4 2011

IT professor Girish Kumar, who has documented a detailed analysis of disadvantages of cell phone technology in India, has challenged the cell phone operators to prove their claim that EMR does not cause a major health risk.

"If people in the mobile companies think there is no health hazard, then let them stand in front of their own transmitting tower at 1m distance in the main beam for 6 hours - are they willing to take the risk?," he asks. DNA Jan 2 2011

The deal was in the works for all of 24 months. When it was finally made public in March 2004, the telecom world watched in shock and awe. Sunil Bharti Mittal had outsourced the very heart of the telecom business — technology and networks....The Bharti model has been followed by Vodafone India , Idea Cellular, Aircel, Maxis, Videocon, Uninor and others. The telecom outsourcing arrangement is a Harvard Business case study and globally more than 50 boardrooms have discussed the Bharti model. Economic Times Dec 31 2010

If figures tell a story, the technology services' tale has been spectacular: less than $4 billion in 2000 to $62 billion today; an average of 22% yearly growth; from less than 100,000 to over two million employees; an almost non-existent domestic market has grown to $10 billion-a-year opportunity.

Technology bellwether Infosys was 3,000 people in 2000. At the close of the decade, it has grown manpower 40 times to more than 1,25,000. Next 10 years will strengthen India's position as global technology services hub, with Nasscom projecting the industry size at $225 billion by 2020. Times of India Dec 31 2010

INDIA IS STILL PLANNING to develop its own proprietary operating system (OS) rather than use "bugged" Western systems.
The Indian government is still intent on developing its own operating system so it can own the source code and architecture rather than rely on Western technologies.

Mukesh Ambani's company Reliance Infotel, which is the only company with pan India spectrum to launch BWA services, has plans of selling tablets at less than Rs 8,000.

Our sources tell us that the company is currently testing tablets from almost 15 Taiwanese vendors. It has already decided that it will use LTE technology for its network.
Infotel is likely to announce its plans in the first quarter of 2011 and will start network roll-out soon after.
While the specs of the tablet are not known, our sources are certain that it will use LTE, or Long Term Evolution high speed broadband technology. TelecomYatra Dec 22 2010

The Adam is a 10-inch tablet starting at $375.33 that runs on a customized Eden UI, which combines elements from Android 2.3 and 3.0. Pre-orders began two weeks ago, although the company has not confirmed a shipment date.
In a blog post Rohan Shravan, founder and CEO of Notion Ink, said he wanted to wait until CES to demo the Adam, "but I can't stand against all of you." PC Mag 19 Dec 2010

The long awaited Adam tablet brought out by India based company Notion Ink is finally up for pre-order. The Android based tablet sporting a 10.1 inch display screen is available in four ilks, differing in their prices and few specifications, as per Notion Ink website. SILICON INDIA Dec 13 2010

Is it a phone? A radio? A computer? Is it a camera? Well, it can be any or all of them.The Adam comes with a memory expandable to 128 GB (you could possibly fit your entire movie library in it). A 3-megapixel swivel camera, fingerprint- and scratch-resistant touch-screen, a digital compass, GPS facility. Bluetooth and 3G HSPA connectivity are part of the package, too.The product comes equipped with HDMI Video output, USB and mini-USB ports for manual data transfer, while supporting Adobe AIR and Flash. HINDU BUSINESSLINE Dec 13 2010.

Online giant Google has released a report – ‘Zeitgeist’ – on what 81 million Indian netizens have been searching for on the web. The company analyses billions of search queries to come up with the annual report.

Indian Railways continues to top the chart. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) emerged as the most searched for year-on-year, followed by low-cost smartphone maker Micromax Mobiles and YouTube movies.

Among the most popular on the web, Songs, Facebook and Google remained on the top. BUSINESS STANDARD December 13 2010

Mushrooming technical institutes and engineering colleges, often accused of poor standards, can now look forward to some handholding by the IITs.

The four-decade-old Institutes of Technology Act is being amended so that IITs shoulder additional responsibility of supporting and collaborating with technical education institutions and advising state governments on technological problems within the zone they are located. The Times of India December 6 2010

The banker wanted another business card as the one Srinivasu Chakravarthula handed had ‘holes’. Unknown to the banker, the card was embossed in Braille that enables the blind to read. The banker’s response presented Srinivasu an opportunity to get to work — educating her about a technology that has made life easier for the disabled.

As accessibility manager at Yahoo! India’s research centre in Bangalore, Srinivasu teaches people about bringing technology closer to the disabled. As far as physical traits go to decide if an employee fits in, the 29-year-old computer science graduate is quite qualified: he is blind. ...ECONOMIC TIMES Dec 7 2010

Bangalore-based Notion Ink has developed a slate with Android 2.2 Froyo operating system (OS) that could rival Apple’s iPad. The buzz about it began over a year back but the final countdown has just started.

The device, which would be launched as Adam, has caught the attention of bloggers and gizmo freaks, who are waiting with bated breath for its launch this December..... DNA Nov 30 2010

The book is a lot more than a treasure trove of information, even to an Indian IT industry watcher of 25 years and a frequent visitor to the 'city of gardens', as it delves into the history of erstwhile 'Mysore state', renamed Karnataka. The book very systematically brings alive the story of the burgeoning IT industry, with Bangalore-based companies contributing nearly 36 per cent to India's software exports... Sanjiv Kataria reviewing "India's Silicon Plateau: Development of Information and Communication Technology in BangaloreBy R. C. Mascarenhas in BUSINESS WORLD.

The police in Kerala have arrested someone for having forwarded an internet mail he’d got, making fun of the state’s communist party and its chief.....When we had given those warnings about the IT law, we’d said the passage of such clauses was an insult to Indian democracy and should be vigorously opposed. Editorial in NEW INDIAN EXPRESS Nov 20 2010

“Companies in the US are still reeling under effects of the downturn and legal heads of MNCs are under severe pressure from CEOs/CFOs to cut costs. And cost-cutting can only be achieved by outsourcing legal work to India,” says Abhi Shah, CEO of LPO Clutch Group.The manpower costs in India are far less that those in the US, thereby fuelling outsourcing, says Sanjay Kamlani, co-CEO of LPO Pangea3. DNA Money Nov 15 2010

For Shivam Sai Gupta, the 14-year-old from Patna, making computer games is literally a child's play. Drew to computers after he stumbled upon a Power Point presentation when he was 11, Shivam developed a penchant for computer and eventually became a games lover.

Recently, he developed and put on live a game based on 26/11 (when terrorists attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008). Indiagames, the games developing company that has offered to provide him with necessary infrastructure to develop computer games, has decided to write a mobile version of the game.HINDU BUSINESSLINE Nov 13 2010

It has become fashionable in Washington to complain that companies overseas, particularly in India, are stealing American jobs. "Outsourcing" has become a dirty word and has been labeled as villainous by candidates for Congress this election.
But the truth is that India-based companies are bringing jobs to the United States in large numbers. The top six Indian information technology companies alone have created more than 35,000 jobs in the United States, according to a recent study by the India Brand Equity Foundation. San Francisco Chronicle Blog Nov 4 2010

Bartz says while coping with the fast-paced industry was definitely an issue, Yahoo is now on track, having doubled its profits this year. By 2012, the company plans to achieve profit margins of 15-20% from around 6% last year. Yahoo, which has around 600 million users globally, and controls 73% of the Indian internet market, will also look for acquisitions in the country across content and technology space or to gain a bigger share of the audience.
ECONOMIC TIMES Nov 11 2010

"Mr. Obama “is not going to interfere with companies doing what they need to do to be competitive.”

“He’s too smart,” (Presidential biographer William) Chafe says of the president. “Obama may make rhetorical gestures to those who want him to be more protectionist, but he won’t do it because it would set off a cycle of retribution that is not in America’s best interest,” WALL ST.JOURNAL BLOGS NOV 1 2010

The fact is that there is outward investment from India into the U.S. economy, which is creating jobs, which is something we would like to convey to President Obama and his delegation," said Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, at a press conference Thursday.

Indian officials will tell Obama and his delegation that the diaspora of Indian professionals with advanced skills in IT, business, and other high-demand areas to the U.S. has helped the American economy. They'll also note that many Indian service providers have established U.S. subsidiaries that hire American workers.

"If you look at the historical evolution of globalization, this is simply the latest phase. The center of gravity has shifted, with cars moving to Japan, then low-cost manufacturing moving to China and now the more knowledge-intensive work flowing to India," said Partha Iyengar, head of research for Gartner India, a U.S.-based global IT research organization. "Unfortunately, this time the U.S. is feeling it." The outsourcing issue is a sore point in an otherwise deepening relationship between India and the United States, which see each other as vital partners in areas like counterterrorism, defense contracts and nuclear energy.WASHINGTON POST Nov 7 2010

What is most striking to me being in India this week, is how many Indians, young and old, expressed their concerns that America seems at times to be running away from the world it invented and that India is adopting.....Thomas Friedman in his New York Times column this week. Nov 2 2010

OPINION: American jobs are being lost because of outsourcing, to places like BangaloreSo, unlike many other visiting dignitaries, President Obama is going to give that city a careful miss during his three-day Indian sojourn. That stands to reason, given that he has already announced visa restrictions that will affect India's software giants, and tax changes to prevent the "exporting of American jobs", as Lou Dobbs says it..... Editorial in Business Standard by T.N. Ninan ( October 30 2010)

Outsourced,” NBC’s new Thursday night sitcom, is about a Kansas City novelty company that moves most of its jobs to India and sends an American manager to run things. To see how the show compared to real life, The New York Times took two episodes to an India office of UnitedLex, a company based outside Kansas City, with most of its employees in India, and asked them to review it.

For a country that's supposed to be a world leader in information technology, India is woefully lacking when it comes to providing the benefits of that prowess to its own citizens. As against a telephone subscriber base, fixed and mobile, of over 706 million, the number of fixed internet subscribers is barely over 16 million. And of these, only 9.77 million are broadband users as against the government target of 20 million broadband users by this year. In an era where internet access has become as basic a utility as electric power, the government is not addressing the digital divide with sufficient urgency. Editorial in The Times of India Oct 27

Once a week, year six pupils at Ash-mount Primary School in North London settle in front of their computers, put on their headsets and get ready for their math class. A few minutes later, their teachers come online thousands of kilometers away in the Indian state of Pun-jab.

Ashmount is one of three state schools in Britain that decided to outsource part of their teaching to India via the Internet.....International Herald Tribune / Fiancial Chroncle Bangalore

Passengers travelling to the Bengaluru International Airport from the International Tech Park will soon find they never have to go ‘offline'. The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation's Vayu Vajra bus service, which ferries people to the airport and back, is soon set to provide entertainment and Internet consoles attached to the back of every seat.

Besides browsing the Internet, software packages will enable passengers to easily keep track of flight information, book tickets and even do an online check-in during their commute. Integrating such ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) and PTS (Passenger Information System) will increase passenger comfort and get more people to switch to public transport, BMTC officials said. ( see our Image of the Day feature on this page) The Hindu ( Bangalore) October 22 2010

Mobile number portability (MNP), that will allow a wireless phone subscriber to retain his number while shifting to another service provider in the same circle (state), is all set to be pushed to the next calendar year, 2011.

In 2009, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had set January 1, 2010, as the date for introducing portability of mobile phone numbers.

The deadline for implementing MNP was shifted many times during this year, the last one being set for October 31, 2010. DNA October 14 2010

The Supreme Court has said that the new judges being appointed in lower courts must have the basic knowledge of computer operations.

'It will be unfair to overlook basic knowledge of computer operation for being a judge' when the steps were being taken for the computerization of the courts for their efficient management, said a bench of Justice Mukundakam Sharma and Justice Anil R. Dave in a judgment Friday.

The court said this while rejecting a petition by Vijendra Kumar Verma who was not selected for judicial service because he lacked basic knowledge of computer operations. SIFY / IANS

Small IT Firms Taking The World By Storm
The Indian IT/ITeS industry may lately have been at the receiving end of US President Barrack Obama's protectionist policies,but when it comes to most US government websites,Obama and his boys rely heavily on popular Made-in-India software FusionCharts for data visualisation.
Surprisingly,FusionCharts is no big ticket tech firm out of one of India's hot and happening IT hubs.Little known back home in India but popular abroad,this niche software firm is just a 30-member outfit based out of Kolkata from where it caters to its Fortune 500 clientele across 110 countries. Times of India October 10 2010

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is working on creating a futuristic computing system, including India's own operating system, said V.K. Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister and DRDO Director-General.

“We do not have our own operating system. Today, various bodies, including banks and defence establishments, need security. Having our own operating system will help us prevent hacking of our systems.”

Two software engineering centres are being set up for this purpose in Bangalore and New Delhi. THE HINDU ( BANGALORE) OCTOBER 10 2010

IN THE southern Indian state of Kerala,the superstar of Hindi cinema,Amitabh Bachchan isnt the biggest draw.Here,Mammootty and Mohanlal call the shots.So,when you stumble upon a team of animators in Thiruvananthapuram researching Big Bs every move,gesture and dialogue,and caricatures of Bachchan move around on their computer screens while someone tries to match his baritone in a typical Malayali accent,you are left a tad befuddled.The head of the team,P Jayakumar,chief executive officer of Toonz Group,comes to the rescue as he reveals that the boys are working on a new animated flick titled Twinergy,which casts Bachchan in an animated format...... ECONOMIC TIMES OCTOBER 10 2010

Sixteen students have been suspended from a school Chandigarh after one of them posted abusive comments against a teacher, who had given him zero marks in an internal mathematics examination recently.

The students, including seven girls, of class XII were yesterday suspended for three months after one student uploaded the photo of the teacher and posted abusive comments on the social networking website Facebook, a school spokesperson said here today.

15 other students of the Vivek High School had supported the comments of the student in public abusing the mathematics teacher, director of the school HS Mamik said. DNA October 8 2010

Google Instant, a new way of searching that makes search more interactive and helps you find information more quickly and easily, has made its India debut.

The service launched in the US and some other geographies on Septmeber 8 has been launched in India. The new technology, can save two seconds to five seconds off every Internet search, Google said. Times of India, October 7 2010

Tom Hanks and his producing partner, Gary Goetzman, said theirPlaytone companywill bring “Electric City” to the Web early next year. The project, which its creators hope will eventually be spun off into other media, may also offer a preview of Hollywood’s future: it is being produced as a joint venture with Reliance Big Entertainment, a media company in India that is playing a growing role in global entertainment properties. NEW YORK TIMES 2 OCT 2010

Virtusa Corporation, a global IT services company, has opened its new campus at Nanakramguda near Hyderabad, built with an investment of Rs 73 crore( Rs 730 million).

The campus has come up on 6.32 acre with a built-up space of 350,000 sft. When fully completed, it would have a seating capacity of 6,000. Virtusa chairman and chief executive officer Kris Canekerante said the company planned to add 1,500 people in the first phase to the existing 1,500. It would add another 3,000 in the second phase. BUSINESS STANDARD SEP 30 2010

As the law stands, India prohibits the use of encryption using ciphers with a block size larger than 40 bits, which is plain ridiculous. No financial transaction is safe if carried out on encryption less than of 128 bits. As a result, India’s electronic commerce violates the law. Economic Times Sep 29 2010

In the United States, law enforcement and security agencies have raised privacy concerns with a new proposal for electronic eavesdropping powers to track terrorists and criminals and unscramble their encrypted messages. But here in India, government authorities are well beyond the proposal stage. Prompted by fears of digital-era plotters, officials are already demanding that network operators give them the ability to monitor and decrypt digital messages, whenever the Home Ministry deems the eavesdropping to be vital to national security. NEW YORK TIMES Sep 29 2010

Infosys Technologies has announced that it has been awarded the 2010 Force of Ideas Award at the Corporate Strategy and Finance Board Summit hosted by the Corporate Executive Board, USA in Washington DC.

This award recognizes management practices that redefine the way companies do business, creating sustainable value for organizations. Infosys has been awarded this honor under the category of ‘Strategic Engagement’ for its unique strategic planning methods engaging all stakeholders. Sep 24. INDIAN EXPRESS

Bangalore held the fifteenth Robot World Cup 2010, organised by the Federation of International Robot Soccer Association (FIRA), for the first time in the country. The event concluded on Sunday ( Sep 19) with teams from Taiwan, China and Korea winning in most of the categories. In the humanoid soccer match, three robots from each team played against three from another team, Korea won the first and second prize while Taiwan won the third place.In the simulation event, the Chinese team won first and second places, while the team from PESIT, India, won third place.The overall championship was shared by two teams both from Taiwan and the third prize went to the Korean team. Sep 20 2010 Indian Express

Called 'Interactive Platform On Mobile (IPOMO)', the college provides handsets (a common model) to the students and teachers, where games and messaging options are disabled. Instructions are given to students and teachers on using the handset. After the respective tasks are done, the handsets are returned to the college. Sep 20 2010Times of India

Citizens, for they get to voice their opinions and ideas.Deputy chairman of Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, said a special portal will be opened soon where people can drop in their suggestions. "We plan to make the process more inclusive. We invite people to comment and post their approaches on the portal. The suggestions will be discussed while finalizing the 12th plan," he said. Sep 20 Times of India